


Numinous Descenso

by cobbvanth



Series: Numinous Descenso [1]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Arguing, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Depression, Dirty Talk, Drugs, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Inappropriate use of Spanish, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mildly Dubious Consent, Oral Sex, Overstimulation, Please read with caution, References to Drugs, Smut, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 06:48:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28467072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cobbvanth/pseuds/cobbvanth
Summary: girl meets boy. boy meets girl. boy also happens to be involved in one of the fastest growing drug empires in the world. you try not to think about that.
Relationships: Gustavo Gaviria x Reader, Gustavo Gaviria/Reader, Gustavo Gaviria/You
Series: Numinous Descenso [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2134386
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. as you are, so too am i

Colombia sleeps. 

The scorching heat of the mid-day sun is unforgiving and relentless; waves of light bouncing off the cell-towers and metal roofs, dancing in the air like roiling water and lulling every creature into a state of temporary suspension. Time is at a standstill, halted by the starshine, uncomfortable and dragging until it’s nearly impossible to distinguish if an hour has passed or just a few seconds. No one moves, and if they do it’s to seek more reprieve; lazily flicking their wrists, swinging between their fingers a paper fan or bringing a glass of cool whiskey to their lips. 

The pool shimmers - white and baby blue like someone had taken a blowtorch to crystal clear glass and let the beads collect to make water - a laminated picture in a magazine. Water laps quietly against its marble sides with the breeze in some invisible current - cold and refreshing and inviting - and consider swimming - cooling off a little because this sun is unbearable even from where you sit partially shaded under an umbrella but it’s nothing compared to the scorching pressure of eyes on you from across the patio. 

Heady and ruthless, hidden behind a pair of dark aviators. Gustavo leans back - the chair creaks - whines as he adjusts his weight - and he flicks his cigarette against some expensive looking clay ashtray, barely notices as the wind blows a few of the charcoal dust looking pieces away and onto the table. His eyes are on _you_. Innocent and unassuming. A pretty little thing in your bathing suit - trying not to squirm as you’re pinned by his magnifying glass of a gaze. You’re so pretty. Always so pretty - even more so when you’re acting like you can’t feel him staring. 

But he knows how every movement is calculated - hyper aware and almost a little bit stilted; like you’re nervous, a little shaky - and he follows every single one. The way you lick your lips, move your hair, uncross and then re-cross your legs like you can’t sit still - can’t decide on a pose and stick with it and it isn’t like he makes you feel insecure either and that’s why you’re fidgeting. Christ - he _worships_ you - is more in love with you and your body than you are with it and that’s why you’re so comfortable letting him violate it - letting him push your boundaries - because underneath the panicked fear is trust. 

Trust that he won’t break you in the ways that matter. 

Trust that he’ll destroy you in all the ways that don’t. 

He swishes his tequila around - his hand dwarfing the glass - the ice rattling against the sides of his half-finished drink. The air smells like sunshine - a little like chlorine and limes - and a cloud, fluffy and white, blots out the sun for just a second and it must be enough for you to decide to get up - like it had cleared away whatever trance you were in that made you so cautiously alert. 

The conversation lulls - falls into a brief repose - exchanges he had only been half listening to put on pause. 

Gustavo unbuttons his shirt - off white dotted with what look like palm trees or leaves or some kind of plant - _whatever_ \- it doesn’t matter - what matters is that he’s moving. His fingers - dexterous and long and _fucking perfect_ ; so good to you - move in a manner that can only be classified as sinful - passive yet deliberate. He knows exactly what he’s doing, knows that you’re watching him watch you and so he’s putting on a show - posturing - can read you like a goddamn book and knows how much you like this - then the fabric falls. 

Tanned skin covered in a thin sheen of sweat - relaxed - big and broad and it makes you fucking like - short circuit for a second - and his stomach looks so soft and you remember about how you always gravitate to it when he’s fucking you - need to feel it soft and firm beneath your greedy fingers, and remember how you use it as leverage to help you fuck yourself in bed - how you brace your palms against his flesh and _rock_ \- drag yourself up and down his cock - feel every fucking inch of him as he coos at you - arrogant and pleased with a voice that drips like a sickly sweet venom. 

_“Mírate, usando mi pinga, niñita.”_

_“Tómalo tan bien, también, pero has tenido mucha práctica, ¿sí? Sí.”_

Yeah, lots of practice. Enough to have you clenching around nothing at just the sight of his bare chest - arousal thrilling and startling and penetrating and- and almost a little fucking shameful because he’s got you wrapped so tightly around his fingers he’s becoming the air you _breathe_ \- pools deep in your lower abdomen; a hot coil that sends your stomach into flutters. And he can probably tell too - can always fucking tell because something about him forces transparency. He’s had plenty of time to memorize the way you work - has seen and touched you more intimately than anyone in your life and so of course he knows - of course he can see right through you - see the way you battle with your thoughts. 

He takes a sip of his drink - lips curling around the rim and you look at his face just in time to see him swallow - beads of perspiration falling from his temples and down the column of his throat. He had shaved this morning but dark hair still peppers his neck and face. You watched him from the bed - spread out among silk sheets and goose-feather pillows - followed each flick of his wrist - looked away, shy and embarrassed every time you made eye contact through the mirror - and he laughed; low and dark - and continued what he was doing like you weren’t laying there with his cum drying between your legs. 

You blink when the light catches.

The gold chain around his neck glimmers, his medallion shining from where it sits just below the space between his clavicles. His expression is hidden - visage dark and hawk-like beneath the brim of his hat - and you can’t tell if he’s looking at you or if he’s look away - mysterious and thrilling and fucking _**scary**_ , but this is all part of a much bigger game that you play in which he’s always victorious. Your cheeks flush, warm and tingling, and acknowledge vaguely in the part of your brain that still works that you need to get a hold of yourself before you bite off more than you can chew. 

So you turn away and walk - cognizant of the feel of your feet against the smooth wood flooring that lines the space between the hotel and the pools. Music coming from the radio. The caw of birds - of beach seagulls - and the noise of waves as they hit the beach sound in the background of your mind - muted by the blood rushing in your head. He’ll follow. Trail behind you just enough to make you feel like you’re safe - like you’re in control - and you’ll go wandering through the halls - let the wide wooden fans swirling just as lazily as the cooking sun cool you off and the smell of the ocean; of expensive cologne and perfume and _money_ \- lull you into a faux state of relaxation. 

Then he’ll be there, just around the corner. Or behind you. Tall and encompassing - pressed up against you like he had been right behind you the whole time. And you’ll startle like you always do - fall back into his arms and steady yourself on him - grasp his biceps and look up at him with large eyes filled with thrilled unease - barely able to catch your breath before he’s pushing you against the nearest wall, callused palm pressed against your throat - squeezing a little so that you’re forced to inhale out of instinct. 

_“Eso fue un buen intento, nena.”_

Good try. Always a good try. And you think that maybe you’re out of your depth - kind of an idiot for sharing a bed with a man like him - for associating yourself with any of them, really, because they’re the most wanted men in Colombia - most famous drug traffickers in the world - being zeroed in on by not only this country’s government but the fucking United States as well and you know that they don’t play fair - that they’ll do everything they can to catch Pablo - catch his body guards, catch his drivers, catch his _cousin_ \- go through anything and anyone to get to him and that’s _terrifying_ and it’s stupid that you managed to find yourself caught somewhere among it all - outside - resting at the cliff’s edge - enjoying the champagne and expensive food; the clothing and jewelry days spent on beaches with nothing more to worry about other than if your hat might blow away in the breeze. 

Savoring the perks of blood money. 

But it’s not really yours right? It’s _plato_ spent on _you_ by _him_ and you’d be lying to yourself if you said that it didn’t scratch some itch to be pampered - to be in the company of a man so powerful - to feel protected and taken care of - so maybe you don’t mind it as much as you thought and are just bothered by the idea that you can become so callus. 

Because you love him. A little more than you should. A little more than he probably loves you. 

That’s alright though because it’s enough. You know for as much as he takes and takes and takes he gives. For as much as he taunts - murmurs sardonically at you and squeezes your breast maybe a pinch too hard - kisses you until your lips feel raw and red and numb - drooling and choking on your words - he’ll keep you safe. He’ll brush the hair away from your face - drag his lips over every inch of your body - talk to you and make you smile - because you’re his and no one else’s. 

You step inside the lobby and stop - watch and listen. People - staff - talk to each other as they go about their business. A bellhop drags someone’s suitcases down the hall with him in a cart. Most of the doors are open letting in air - fresh and sweet smelling - loft throughout the room. Kids returning from the beach carry in sand from their flip flops, zipping past their parents, chirping excitedly about the events of the day - how cool that wave was - how tall they made their sandcastle - what seashells they found. You smile, give them a little wave, and try to ignore the way your skin prickles with awareness. 

You turn instinctively, find him leaning against the door frame you just walked through - nonchalant, loose - a fucking god among men with his hands in his pockets - and you smile again, give the same little wave and he waves back with his fingers - smile too in playful amusement. 

Gustavo pushes off the beam and strides towards you - stops when he’s standing so close that you feel like you should take a step back but you don’t. You look at his open shirt and are unable to resist the urge to immediately touch him, placing your hands flat on the part of his chest where his ribs bend to meet his back, then you look up at him and roll your lips between your teeth, trying not to give yourself away too soon. 

“Bored?” He tilts his head to the side, juts his bottom lip out a little as he fiddles with your hair - twirls a few locks between his thumb and pointer finger. He smells good - like cedar and sandalwood and a little like the alcohol on his breath and the lemon he had been peeling and it immediately goes to your head - clears away any process of coherent thought. He’s so fucking close and he smells like - delicious - and okay -

You’re more than your body’s response to stimuli. You just need to breathe. You need to focus and answer his question and maybe act like a functioning human being because you’re very much in public and you doubt it would be very appropriate to just have him fucking - take you right then and there, so like - _think_. Say words. Do _something._

_“Look at me. I asked you a question and I want an answer, niñita.”_

“Hot,” you correct, leaning into his touch, cupping his hand with yours before pressing your lips to the inside of his wrist. “And a little bored, yeah.” 

“What?” Gustavo tuts. “You don’t like listening to us talk, baby?” 

Listening to him talk, maybe. The rest of them? No. Discussing something about amnesty - paying the Colombian debt for it - the government saying _no_ \- not being allowed to go back - which is awful and concerning and as much as you want to ask Gustavo about it you keep your mouth shut because he’ll take care of it. They’ll take care of it. 

And it’ll be fine. It’ll work out. 

“It’s just that I’d much rather be doing something else.”

God - what are words? What are you even _saying_? He’s studying your face, his own expression etched with a sort of delight that makes you feel like he’s in on some secret - probably enjoying the way you don’t know how to act around him. 

“Like what?” He challenges, prompts you like he has no idea what you’re talking about. He likes doing this to you - making you vocalize your desires - likes hearing you ask for them. Beg for them. Loves the sound of your voice, a little abashed, quiet at first until he tells you to speak up. And you always do - apologize first and tell him exactly what you need - and he gives it to you too.

His free hand drops to your waist - molds against the curve of your hip easily - grabs at the flesh and tugs you closer until your hips slot against his own. Your stomach buzzes with nervous energy and your chest feels tight and there are tiny flickers of anticipation flaring up and down your spine because you know where this leads. It’s just a matter of a few syllables. 

So you decide to be braver - and the air in the lobby, you’re almost positive, has suddenly turned blisteringly, unbearably hot. 

“Suck your cock.” 

Gustavo sucks in a breath. 

You lick your lips.

A series of movements follow. 

Little flashbulbs and snapshots - ignited and then snuffed out. 

Your trip down the hallway. The elevator ride up. A handful of seconds from point A to point B. The feel of him sweltering against your back, nipping at your earlobe, undoing the strings of your bikini - letting it drop. Fumbling to get the door open. Less than a moment to have it slamming shut behind you. Tumbling through the entryway. Groping, grasping hands. 

“Gustav-” 

The words die in your throat as he’s turning you around, grabbing you by your chin. Still moving. Doesn’t stop fucking moving. Pushing you further into the bedroom. 

“You have no idea how much I want to fuck you.” 

_**Fuck.** Oh **shit.**_

He’s hot and heavy and fucking _devastating_ , pushing you towards the bed and you have some idea - some fucking clue because _fuck_ if this morning wasn’t any indication of that you have no idea what it was - and you’re stumbling backwards, tripping over your own damn feet trying to keep pace with him - unable to look back because he’s kissing your neck, forcing your head to tilt up towards the ceiling - so you squeal - obviously - in surprise when the back of your knees collide with the frame and he’s _laughing,_ all sharp teeth and wolfish smile - hauling you into his lap before laying you down. 

“Yeah?,” you counter - and it might not be eloquent but it’s all you can think of saying because you want to hear him say it again - the idea of him thinking about this, about _you_ \- almost too much for you to handle. 

“Yeah,” he confirms, mouthing at your breasts, looking up at you through his eyelashes. “While you sat in your chair…taking sips of your drink, looking at me…I imagined burying myself in this pussy.” 

_Jesus fucking Christ._

You shift your weight beneath him, distantly register the way the slick fabric of your bathing suit bottoms cling to your cunt - already wet, of course you’re already fucking wet - heat, scalding and unavoidable, pooling in the pit of your stomach, and you concede that maybe he’s finally done it. He’s broken you. Turned you into some blabbering play-thing, any brain power you had left fizzling out with a pop of radio static. 

It’s clear he wasn’t really looking for an answer from you though - descending, steady and hungry, pulling you closer to him, the swell of his cock in his shorts hard and hot and thick between your thighs. 

You open your mouth to say something but you don’t know what. You can hardly think with the way he inches lower and lower, the heel of his palm pressing feather-light against your clit and his fingers dipping inside you - teasing, testing - not nearly enough but you know that if you whine now he’ll only torture you for longer. “ _Darle algo por lo que llorar.”_

Shoulders, large and broad, nudge your legs further apart and they fall so easily that you blush - your chest blooming in flustered warmth. Gustavo hums against your skin - calloused palms sliding up and down the sensitive insides of your thighs and you feel like you might explode from the tension, resisting the urge to wriggle. Your chest heaves with every breath you take and you look down to catch his gaze - brown eyes swallowed nearly by black with how blown his pupils are - desire so evident in his face that you look away. 

All the while he continues to fuck you slowly with his fingers, taking his time, curling them _up_ , flexing his wrist and dragging his thumb over your clit - his watch digging uncomfortably into the juncture of your leg where it meets your torso, but it’s okay because all of it is mingling together - harrowingly acute and sharp and so fucking intense already that you flutter around him, helplessly keening. If he’s sympathetic to your plight it doesn’t show. He just keeps going. Sinks two digits in and out - adds a third - dipping and stretching you open. Then he’s kissing your cunt - open mouthed and filthy, rumbling rich and low at the taste of it and it fucking shoots right through you, makes you squeeze around his digits. Makes you gasp and reach for his hair, dark waves soft beneath your touch. 

“Mírame,” Gustavo murmurs, tone as rough as gravel. You can’t help it - it’s all too much and not enough and it feels like he’s injected your veins with slow-burning fire, spreading sleepily, beginning to envelope you completely, making you pant and close your eyes and _whine_ \- sweet and low and pathetic - something that might be his name or _please please please **please.**_

He won’t give you the same warning twice - not without its consequences - so you aren’t surprised that he removes his mouth and pinches you a little too hard - enough to sting, to make you yelp, eyes flying open to look down at him. 

“I said look at me.” 

You swallow thickly, nod, make sure to keep them open as he returns to your core - trailing over every part he can reach. A tether in you begins to tighten - one that’s been keeping you together this entire time starting to grow taut; incinerating and fragile and _right there_ \- ready to snap. If he’d just move a different way, let you buck your hips, or just stay - just keep going because you’re _so close_ , your entire body tingling on some precipice and he’s-he’s- 

Stopping. 

Pulling back. Crawling back up your body. A growing and restless ache settling in your cunt. 

Your skin is too heated, feels abrasive against the bed-sheets and pillows - every nerve you have frayed - bare and warped. And when he kisses you again it’s aggressive - his tongue sweeping over the roof of your mouth and curling around your teeth - tasting like tequila. You struggle to do anything other than take it - letting him kiss you until you feel like you might suffocate and when you gasp into his mouth he only kisses you harder, chuckling when you grind against his stomach. 

“Gustavo I- _please_ , baby. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.” 

Your desperation must be piteous and you know you aren’t breaking his heart, but you’ve got to say something, _anything_ , that might make him have some mercy on you, but when you go to bury your face in his shoulder Gustavo cups the back of your neck - and he reaches out, traces your bottom lip with his fingers, pushes your lip down, reveals your teeth, and watches as your tongue - pink and hot - darts out and laves over the pad of his thumb before sucking the digit into your mouth.The air is balmy - substantial and compacted and **a lot** \- almost too much and his weight above you doesn’t help alleviate the feeling of being smothered; compressed on all sides by his engulfing presence and the stifling atmosphere of the hotel room. 

“ _Sé exactamente_ how much you can take, niñita.” He pinches your chin with his other hand in a movement so sudden that you stare up at him with wide, pitiful eyes that begin to fill with frustrated tears - startled by the action and the force behind it. 

His grip borders on hurting, the soft insides of your cheeks pressed harshly against your teeth and jaw, but you like it - like the pressure - but then it’s gone, his hand creeping lower, his huge palm - so fucking big that you’re almost fascinated with them, watching them whenever you can, aware he knows how much you get off on just the sight - wrapping around your throat; light at first, gentle and calculated. 

Your fingers clench around pristine white sheets - the very same kind you had ruined only hours earlier. Soft and fluffy. Everything about this room screams decadence - screams money. Kind of funny how he’s absolutely tearing you apart in a room so neat, so perfect. 

_“Sólo lo mejor para mi puta.”_

Only the best, you think. 

_Yes._

_Only the best._

He’s squeezing, just enough to have your jaw fall open automatically as your brain panics, and there are a few taut seconds where you just stare at each other before he surges forward and - 

Stops. Again. Grits his teeth, his breath ragged against your hair and his expression tense - the feel of him fucking _impossible_ inside you - enough to have you breathing a little crookedly - feeling full and stretched and sore - 

And then - 

_Fuck_ and then he rocks inside you tortuously slow - deliberately holding back - watching with a sort of predatory narrowed focus as your face contorts into one of desperate pleasure - fucking you so much patience that you whimper and tremble beneath him, sparkling little tiny flares of bliss that make you grasp at him, reach up and wind your hands in the hair at the nape of his neck. 

Then he grinds into you hard - pelvis against pelvis - almost painful in its force. His weight is crushing, your legs spread to accommodate him, wrapped around his hips in a way that has your muscles shaking - exhausted in their efforts to keep him there and cement his body pressed against yours - asphyxiating, muscle pliable, golden chain hanging from his neck and reflecting the low, silver light of the hotel room. It should be uncomfortable, and it kind of is as his hips slam into the cradle of your thighs, but it’s electric - spreads through your body like kerosene - 

It’s overpowering. Everything. All of it. So you aren’t surprised when tears - large and discontented - begin to roll down your temples - begin to congest your head and make you blubber, every word tripping over the other consonants. You’ve never wanted anything else so badly in your life. You could shatter at any moment if he’d just give it to you but he’s choosing to be cruel - to restrain himself because he likes to see how worked up you get. A little sadistic and it makes you sob even harder, air catching over the lump in your throat. 

“You want to cum, don’t you?” He purrs - the velvet in his voice undercut by a current of acidity - almost patronizing in its cadence - slow and languid, pooling in his chest like molasses. You’re mindless, unable to speak and when you don’t he punishes you with a sharp thrust - enough to knock the wind out of your chest and steal the thoughts from your head. “I asked you a question and I want an answer.” 

“Y-Yes,” the world begins to spin as you stare up at him dazed, his face inches from yours. “Wanna cum so bad, please.” 

Gustavo grins but it’s more like a grimace - voracious and dangerous and it makes your lungs begin to hiccup, so worked up and indigent that it feels like the entire world might collapse. “ _Sí,_ ” he drawls, nipping at your bottom lip harshly, “Course you do. Always a needy little thing. Want it so bad that you’re crying.” He coos feigning pity. _“Pobrecito.”_

You arch your back, attempt to wiggle your hips, desperate for friction. His hands around your throat tighten enough for you to see stars - little black dots dancing in your vision, and he pistons his hips, fucks you into the mattress with so much force you begin to move up the pillows. 

A few quick swipes at your clit and you’re letting out a low pitched groan - one that crawls its way up your esophagus - that buzzes and vibrates through his skin as your muscles tense - tighten and ache - and a shiver wracks your body with so much force that every inch of you feels like it must be pressed up against him - orgasm wrenched from you in a way that has you seeing white, lit up like a live wire, the only thing you’re still aware of is his voice in your ear - gruttal and shot-through and thick with arousal.

Yet he doesn’t stop - just keeps going, fucking you properly now, relentlessly pulling every choked and gargled moan from you that he can - the hand that is no longer on your neck digging deep bruises in the shapes of his fingerprints on your hips. 

“Come on, baby. Dame un otra.”

You won’t be able to cum again - _can’t_ \- because if you do you aren’t sure that you’ll be able to recover with nothing you can use to anchor yourself to reality. The world is blurry - half hidden by your tears, not that you have the energy to put it into focus anyway with the way he’s using your body and the only thing you can hear now is your pulse - rapid and strong, beating in your eardrums. 

But he’s able to drag it from you anyway, agonizing in its depth and magnitude, left tensing around him as you shout wordlessly. 

Gustavo croons, pace faltering and it takes one - two - three drags of his cock before he’s cumming, collapsing against you and it feels like an out-of-body experience. Watching acutely aware of his sudden vulnerability - realizing very vaguely what that means, the implications of it, unable to really process it though because he’s got your entire being so high strung you can barely breathe. 

A beat of silence. 

_“Jesus.”_

He kisses you again, slowly, deeply - cupping your jaw with both his hands - elbows caging you in. You kiss him back with what energy you have left, let your eyelids fall closed, warm and exhausted. 

“Eres una buena chica…siempre tan bueno para mí.”

_Yeah._

_Always so good for him._


	2. something wicked this way comes

You understand why people call tragedies like watching a car accident. 

You can’t look away, even if you wanted to, caught in some impossible vortex in which everything is sealed, in which it seems the only thing making it a tragedy at all is that it was witnessed. 

Forces colliding, ramming into each other, leaving behind indescribable damage. 

But the most interesting things, the most important and significant things, don’t always exist at the center. More often than not, what’s worth looking at, experiencing, _watching_ , exists where the edges meet - where they brush up against each other and mingle. 

Air blows up from the sand in currents, pushes the tiny granules up and over his toes, across his ankles, like little pinpricks, almost, thrashing with a ferocity he only remembers experiencing in his youth; escapades taken with Pablo into the mountains where the wind had been just as cruel, whipped around his face in unforgivably sharp needles, kissing his skin until it was raw and red and stiff. The kind of cold that made it hard to breathe.

It hadn’t mattered though because he was a kid. He was with his cousin. They had escaped, momentarily free from the life in which they were growing up - poor, ridiculed little kids, going to sleep to the sound of dogs barking and car doors slamming - just a little too cold at night with street lamps snaking through the windows, with their orange whispers, hypnotizing in their steadiness, harmonizing with the stars, speaking in a foreign yet familiar language of dreams in which an existence like that never had to be experienced again. 

A buzzing of memories creeps like spindly fingers up his neck and settles just behind his head, waiting patiently for him to reach out and unlock their secrets. He’s gotten good at ignoring the flashbulbs when they come; at _compartmentalizing_ , seizing them to his chest until they suffocate. He’s got bigger issues to worry about than the nostalgic hands of his past - ever so present in his future, yet so distant that if he ran fast enough, they’d remain far enough behind that he could fool himself into believing they don’t exist at all, nor bite at the back of his ankles - the antiquity of his life like a porous sponge, filled with every choice, every bad decision, every good one, but what does that mean to a man like him? He who had changed his life so drastically that who he once was and who he is now might as well exist on different planes. 

But he can’t ignore that the history of his life has led to you - has led to a life so good it could quickly go bad the way fully mature things rot. He isn’t sentimental like that, not really, can’t be fucked to really consider whether his life would be richer with you or without you, or with some other woman wearing a different face. It doesn’t, however, change the fact that he’s in love with you - a volatile, weaponized kind of love that drives him to near madness, teetering that precarious edge of feral desperation and dangerous possession. 

He flicks his cigarette, pinched limply between his pointer and middle fingers, can’t see more than a few specks of ash with how black the night is, still red and hot with flame, float away with the rest of it. 

Gustavo closes his eyes, tilts his head up, lets the night cover him like a dark blue, cool blanket and exhales. The smoke swirls around his head like a grey cloud for less than half a second before it’s carried away. The sky doesn’t talk to him anymore, hushed in its allegations, in its scorn. It had stopped whispering a long time ago, perhaps when the means to reach the ends in which he and Pablo were so set to achieve, the very ones its silky and trusting voice had promised, turned sour. Yet he still listens despite himself - strains his ears and waits, curls his toes and feels that, little by little, he is sinking. It remains quiet. He’s met only with the hiss of the sea as lazy waves, filled with foamy white snakes, retreat back into the inky vastness of the ocean. 

And you. Your footsteps. 

“You should come to bed…it’s freezing out here, Gustavo.” 

Your feet squirm a little against the freezing patio, your toes wiggling in an effort to keep themselves off of the ground for as long as they can without sending you off your balance. You had forgotten your shoes inside in your eagerness to find him.

He drops his head, opens his eyes, stares down at the shore like it’ll tell him something else and when it is silent - when it eventually laughs at him for hoping, he turns to look at you from over his shoulder. 

You stand at the railing separating the beach from the pools, bathed in the cool white light emanating from the spotlights put in place for late night swimmers and janitors charged with retrieving dirty towels. He watches as you curl inwards on yourself, crossing your arms, tucking them into the middle of your belly, wrapped in nothing but the pretty silk robe he had bought you for one of your birthdays, a slip of a thing that barely grazes the middle of your thighs. He follows the fabric as it moves slightly with the breeze, flutters upwards at its edges. When he had rolled out of bed you had still been asleep, sprawled among the pillows, an off-white sheet tugged and laying just below your breasts, your hair like a halo against the goose-feather. 

What had been a step outside to smoke a cigarette has turned into something that has taken much longer. He should have suspected you’d be up and following. 

“We’re going back to Colombia,” he says it like a fact - almost like he’s bored with the words, but you know better than to mistake his tone for dismissiveness. He’s angry, maybe even relieved, too. What’s the good in having all this money if you can’t go home? If you can’t enjoy it in the place you’re most comfortable, in the place that you’re loved. It hasn’t gotten past him, though, that you’re all about to walk into a world of shit. Pablo may be comfortable exposing his family to that - to exposing them by venturing into the country the way things are, with their _status_ the way it is. His cousin doesn’t pay men to protect them for nothing, yet he isn’t so sure he’s comfortable with that possibility, not to mention the disaster war would be for business, especially since Pablo made the first move by killing that fucking politician. The only problem is that he isn’t so comfortable with letting you go, either. 

“I know.” You round the fence, the cool metal gliding beneath your palm, then step onto the beach. “Tata told me about her dinner with Pablo…she’s upset.” 

She _was_ upset, rather. She had told you all about her conversation with her husband, her hatred of this place, how she convinced him to _go back_ , even though that would be a stupid fucking idea. You kept your mouth shut, tried to understand, unsure why it’s important to _be important_ when all that should matter is that they’re together and safe. 

You’d give anything for that to always be true.

“She’ll get over it.” He turns away as you approach, brings the bud back up to his lips. Tata is a good woman, smart. She had married a man who thrives most when he’s got something to prove and that’s dangerous, but it had been her choice. They’ve got kids. She’ll follow him no matter what. 

“And me? Will I get over it?” You ask, arms still crossed - no longer just in effort to protect yourself from the wind. You hate that these are the kind of questions you have to come at him with and so you sort of shield yourself, just a little, from the anxiety of voicing your concerns. What used to be thrilling is now unbelievably, irrevocably terrifying, like the putrid green hues of clouds just before a cyclone. 

A beat. The current crests, falls, recedes. 

He pulls the smoke away from his face, tosses it into the sand and extinguishes it with his sandal.

“You don’t want to go?” Gustavo’s voice is gentle, as gentle as he can get it. 

It would be unfair of him to be annoyed at you for having your own hesitations given that he had just unloaded this information onto you without warning, but embers of irritance burn somewhere deep at the bottom of his sternum. He keeps anger in his breastbone, you hold it in your hands. He isn’t in the mood to argue with you about this, or at all, really, because it’s happening regardless. The decision has already been made. Pablo is doing what he wants. The only thing he can do right now is damage control, try to influence Pablo while he still can, make sure they aren’t losing the fucking _kilos_ of money he’s predicting they will as a result of this pea-cocking, and _not argue with you about it._

“No. Not if it means what I think it means.” You answer, starting to chew at the inside of your bottom lip. It’s an awful, painful habit you’re having trouble breaking - needing to feel the pressure and tug of your teeth against the tender flesh, something solid and grounding. You know better, and have tried to stop yourself from doing it more than once, but more often than not your cheeks and lips remain shredded. 

You remember when you first met him - how you could barely stand to look in his direction once you caught sight of him in that seedy little bar, too hot and crowded, smelling like booze and people. He was like some figure out of a biblical painting - the ones that are saturated in reds and browns and whites, the light cutting angles against his face, the smoke swirling around his head like ashes from a battlefield - not beautiful, not really, but equally breathtaking - _commanding_. And you remember feeling a little scared of him, this man that screamed danger. 

But the beginning of things like this - _things that shouldn’t have happened_ \- are necessarily vague and chaotic, a little disturbing. 

You should have thought about how the feeling would haunt you. 

“What do you think it means, niñita?” 

Gustavo looks at you again, grabs at your arm until you drop it to your side, then reaches for your wrist and uses it to guide you to stand in front of him. 

It’s your turn to be silent for a little bit, to weigh the impact of your answer. You feel safest when you’re with him, but this - this feels like the beginning of the end. The feeling makes it almost unbearable to look at him head on, to see his face and wonder. You aren’t a stupid woman. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t exactly in the know about what he and Pablo and the rest of them _really_ do but it isn’t hard to come to your own accurate conclusions. Your biggest fear is losing him. If your gut is right, if what twists and wriggles remorselessly inside your stomach and nearly paralyzes you from its intensity comes to fruition, you’re scared of the kind of person you’d become, if you’d even be able to remain a person at all. 

“I don’t want to be afraid, Gustavo.” Your admission makes you feel a little hollow inside, as if its journey up from your chest to your esophagus and out of your mouth had torn at bits of you on its way. 

“Come here.” He rolls his lips together and brings his hand to your cheek, stares into your face for a long time. 

In you he gets a momentary glimpse of what he’d like to have if the world were perfect, creating some afflicted and voracious expectation that clashes and collides with reality when shit hits the fan and life becomes hyper-focused, in uncomfortable high definition. You are the truth he didn’t want to know about, that he had been hiding from himself - leaving him with no one else to accuse. He’d do anything and everything for you and all you’d have to do is ask. 

“Do you trust me?” Gustavo shifts his weight, leans down closer to you, infiltrating your space and demanding that you look at him. “Hm? Do you love me?” 

God, more than anything. More than you love waking up in the morning, well rested and warm to the sound of birds, lemon sunshine filtering in through clean glass. More than you love your clawfoot bathtub, deep enough to fit the both of you, his solid chest against your back. Creature comforts that have gotten more extravagant since meeting Gustavo. More than you’d ever be able to express into words or action, so intense it feels as if you had swallowed your own heart. You’d symbolically die a thousand times over just to experience the resurrection of being near him, that’s how much you love him.

“Yes.” You murmur, clenching your teeth together once you’ve answered, pressing the tip of your tongue against the backs of them to keep that all too familiar influx and sharp sting from rising to more than a passing emotion. 

“Then you have nothing to worry about, pajarito.” 

It’s a stupid, foolish sentiment. When has love and trust ever really protected anyone from the barrel of a gun? From the shrapnel and fallout of an explosive? But you can’t help in believing it, in believing in him, especially when he’s leaning closer to you now, grabbing hold of your chin and tilting your head up. 

You won’t think about how you have no other option.

“We leave the day after tomorrow.” His breath fans against your cheeks, making you shiver from the contrast of everything else around you. “Pablo’s taking care of everything.” 

“Can’t we do something else?” You reach forward, take his hat off his head and with your free hand, card your fingers through the mess it made of his dark hair. 

“No,” Gustavo brushes his lips against yours, lets out a deep breath. “Not while we’re at war. While we’re at war we can’t do anything.” 

“We’re at war?” You recoil slightly, just enough to make Gustavo move his hand to behind your neck, keeping you from moving all the way back, his thumb on your jugular. 

“We will be soon.” 

“Can’t you talk to Pablo? Try to convince him that going back isn’t a good idea?” You’re grasping at straws and you know it. He does, too. Once Pablo has his mind set on something it’s nearly impossible to get him to consider anything otherwise. Gustavo might have tried, must have already, his resignation to this fucking stupidity very apparent. 

“I wish it were that easy.” 

“So why isn’t it that-”

“Let’s talk about something else, baby.” Gustavo cuts you off, fingers gently squeezing the base of your skull. He looks past you, over your head, towards the moonlight as it dapples against the shifting water. Life has given him like, twenty-five percent of being a good man - and he uses all of that fraction on you, on keeping you happy, so you’ll do what he wants because he doesn’t really ask for anything else. 

You fall apart for him so easily that it’s pitiful, embarrassing. Or at least it would be looking at yourself through lenses you used to wear when you were younger. Growing up, you hadn’t imagined that this is what you’d be doing, what you’d _be_ \- an accomplice, maybe - _kind of_ \- to one of the biggest, fastest growing and destructive drug cartels the world has ever seen. You could be kinder with yourself, rationalize that you aren’t exactly as much a part of it as you are on the outskirts - never pulling the triggers or making the demands yourself. It’s all Pablo, his associates, the men who work under him. _Gustavo._ You don’t do anything to stop it, either, and therein lies the rub. 

Because you’d rather be taken care of than be dignified, whatever that means - if it could mean anything at all when you’re with a man like him. There isn’t any real dignity in that, is there? 

“Okay,” you concede, licking your lips. “Let’s talk about going someplace else…” 

Gustavo scoffs, chuckles underneath his breath and shakes his head. “Listen to this.. _.go someplace else_ …where would we go? Where would we run-off together?” 

Your cheeks burn with cutting defiance and you swat at his wrists until he drops away from you completely, leaving him to cross his arms. You hate when he gets like this, when he’s condescending and a little mean and looking at you like that - like you have no idea what you’re talking about. What you hate most right now, though, is the way you feel like you’ve been doused in a cup of ice-water, his body heat no longer close enough to keep you warm. 

You feel so stupid and young, like something is cracking inside of you most of the time. Or maybe it’s the whole world cracking open. You don’t know how Tata handles it. You don’t know and you’re kind of afraid to ask out of fear of the answer, out of fear that she’ll say she just - _doesn’t_. That most of the time she is seconds away from having a breakdown. It leaves you doing your best to pretend like what you don’t talk about won’t matter in the end. 

“I’m being serious, Gustavo,” You cross your arms too, doing your best to hold your ground, to appear tough which is like - fucking impossible because he’s _him_ ; so much taller than you, big and broad-shouldered, annoyance bubbling in your stomach, corrosive and tart. “We could go anywhere.” 

He looks away from you and down at his feet, then brushes his fingers over his mustache, expression pinched, realizing he must have hurt your feelings. He hadn’t intended to do anything close to that, but the day had already been long - filled with barely disguised, hostile skirmishes with the other men about amnesty, about laying low and politicians and money and cocaine and trying to get it into Pablo’s head that returning to Colombia does not mean having to prove to Congress who holds the real power. Talking about leaving, about fleeing to another country and abandoning what he’s built with his family isn’t something he’s interested in entertaining. Still, he can’t expect you to fully understand that. 

“Why would you want to run away with a criminal like me?” Gustavo reaches for you again, then sags minutely in relief when you don’t pull away. He’s grinning, boyish and charming, a silent plead at forgiveness, like he’s in on some secret that he wants to share with you and it makes him look so fucking handsome that you can’t really stand it - your lungs swelling and expanding inside your rib cage. 

So you smile back in spite of yourself, place the ascot cap onto your own head to free up your hands and reach for him too, gripping the fabric of his cotton dress shirt, different from this afternoon, the plants swapped for vertical, dark orange stripes. “I could come up with a few reasons…” 

“Yeah?” He counters and he wishes that he could do what you’re asking, but he can’t just leave like that. He and Pablo and everyone else are already in too deep, not to mention the hell he’d catch if he ever decided that this was something he didn’t want to do anymore. It just doesn’t work like that. 

“Yeah.” You roll your bottom lip between your teeth, then yipe when he swats at your ass. He soothes the burn with a groping and greedy palm.

“What might they be, niñita.”

“I don’t know if I should tell you. It might go to your head…” 

Gustavo feigns offense, as if your words had wounded him physically somehow but the edges of his grin never leave his face, even as he tuts at you and places his hand around your throat, light and waiting. “You are very evil for such a young girl. Tell me, porfra…” 

You pretend to think about it, reaching to play with the medallion hanging from his neck. This is a game you’re playing but part of you wants to be serious, to convince him. You’d follow him to the bottom of the deepest sea, stand there under the water and hold your breath until your chest ached with the pressure of it, and risk drowning if it meant that you could always be close to him, away from this and truly safe. When you’re with him the world looks different, and you’ve grown to like the way you see things, things you’ve never seen before, but you also find yourself feeling acutely visible to everything and everyone - the kind of unhindered transparency that comes from second-hand contact with a person who lives without remorse - without questioning whether it’s his right to take something or not, a person who just _does._

Maybe that’s the trick, to forgo control. 

To just _do_ one day instead of _think._

Except where’s that threshold? The one between confidence and recklessness? The one in which if you stay behind it, you won’t find yourself getting killed. 

“Well…” you draw out, tugging him downwards by his chain, pleasure blooming within your chest, seeping between the spaces of your ribs like the drink of something hot after being out in the cold when he follows easily and without protest. “The money’s pretty great, not gonna lie…” 

Gustavo huffs and rolls his eyes, tilting your head back slightly, making you look up and down the bridge of your nose at him. All you do is laugh, the noise trapped a little, and keep going. 

“And I’d miss the way you fuck me if you left me behind.” 

“So you’ve been using me for my cock, is that what I’m supposed to take away from this, chimbita?” His smile turns wolfish, all teeth and poorly concealed lechery. 

“You wanted reasons, Gustavo. I’m just giving you some, but…” You trail off, glancing down at the emblem warming between your fingers. ‘O Mary, Conceived Without Sin, Pray For Us,’ a symbol of humility and obedience. Kind of funny. Kind of not. “If you really want to know, I’d run away because I love you.” 

His expression drops into one that’s more serious, like he’s contemplating your answer - the sweetness behind it, the sincerity. He doesn’t question your loyalty but he sometimes wonders why it’s there, why you harbor it so carefully, because a relationship with him will most certainly end up being a mistake. 

“Silly…you’re a silly girl.” 

Probably. Most definitely. You’re not sure you’d use silly, though. Silly implies that the love you hold for him is saccharine, innocent, with some sort of purity to it, but it’s not like that. The love you harbor is all those things and everything else that contradicts it - a noxious, angry love; a distressing, strung-out, severe trial of devotion. Love that drives you to, in every house you find yourself moving in to, every temporary beachfront hotel, every high rising apartment, every mansion settled between slopping hills green with trees for fucking miles, walk through their halls whispering his name wishing you could scream it. So many times you have died alone in unfamiliar rooms. So many times it’s with his name on your lips. 

Because the thought of him is an obsession ever pressing itself upon you - what you’d imagine it feels like to be one of those statues made out of marble with fingers dug and carved into the stony flesh as if the very makeup of the alabaster were actually clay, impressionable and compliant - your infatuation with him existing in those indentations, at the nucleus of each ivory thumbprint. 

“If I’m a silly girl, what’s that make you, then?” 

Gustavo licks his lips, then bites his bottom one, all fervid amusement and carnal energy, something vicious about the slant of his mouth and the tilt of his jaw. Your eyes fly away from the necklace as he draws you forward, nearly knocking you off balance with the force of it, his face inches from yours when he whispers, voice dark and rich and husky, “ _El Diablo, chiquita_.” 

You let out a strangled noise, filled with surprise and want and longing all jumbled together into something so _needy_ you sound pathetic even to your own ears. 

A moment passes that lasts too long, too taut and tense and saturated with pre-storm tension and you can hear them in your head, the thundering of electrons flowing between clouds, super-heated and vibrating, echoing with a tremendous crack. You study the angles of his face illuminated by the silvery moon, gallant and strong and you think, not for the first time, that you’re in over your head. 

“ _Oh_ ,” you say very, very quietly, the subconscious sense of being on the cusp of something, an earthquake or an eruption, eerie tendrils of a disaster just as deadly crawling up your spine, the open and glittering lights of the stars ripping through your opacity - whatever was left of it, anyway. 

You swallow thickly, break away from his gaze and stare instead at his lips - the part of him you’re most familiar with, the feel of them a haunting, searing pressure. “We should…” Your voice trembles like a split cane, your mind struggling with its grasp on coherency. “We should go back inside, Gustavo.” 

He looks for a little bit longer and you have to remind yourself to breathe. Then he’s dropping his hands and letting you take a small step backwards. And you do so on wobbly legs, the sand shifting in a way that has you nearly falling over, watching him watch you. You’re fascinated with his hands as he fishes into his shirt pocket for another cigarette, plucks one from its pack and places it into his mouth, cups his hand over the flame and lights it, then takes a drag and breathes out. You’d be offended, and peg him for unbothered, if you hadn’t noticed the way his cock strains, half hard against his shorts. 

“After you,” he murmurs. 

All you can do is blink and instruct your legs to move back in the direction of your hotel room, willing yourself not to look as strung-out on him as you feel and when he swats at your ass again as you pass you jump maybe a little too high and gasp maybe a little too loud. 

The walk back is quiet, but it isn’t noiseless, filled with every wave that breaks, your breathing, the sound of your own blood roaring in your head and Gustavo’s footsteps behind you. He’s slightly to your left, the hand that doesn’t hold his cigarette hovering at your lower back - just close enough that you can sort of feel the roughness of it without him actually touching you, little pinpricks of awareness that set your skin on fire. The hallway feels like its endless, stretching further and further with each step you take, teasing you with breaks and brief pauses, only to skip wildly forward and suddenly you’re startling - staring at little white numbers and a peep hole you swore was still a few feet in front of you. 

Gustavo tosses the bud away in time to jerk you backwards towards the bulk of his body, nearly bumping into you but having decided to take measures into his own hands, pushed right up against you, his grip on your waist firm and unforgiving. You don’t flinch, or turn around, keening only when he noses at your hair, speaking against your earlobe, the embers of a dying fire waiting to be ignited again. “You can talk about going somewhere else, niñita, but you’re staying here with me.” 

The air veers - alters and shifts and changes - like all its ions and electrical charges had been disrupted the same way it does when bodies move through space, creating empty pockets where feelings get caught, trapped in these tiny, barren worlds of their own and are left to whirl around in a vacuum, little vortices of sadness or confusion or anger. That’s what it’s like to be with Gustavo, chapters of your existence with him bundled up in these gaps, painting your life in shades of red and blue and sometimes, _sometimes_ a sweet, calming yellow. 

He reaches in front of you, opens the door, turns you around and sends you stumbling over your bare feet and ankles, through the doorway and into the room. 

It’s just about as dark inside as it is outside. You keep the curtains drawn at night, mainly to shield yourself from the rays of the morning sun but also because you’re - no matter how safe Gustavo assures you it is wherever you are, even on the fiftieth floor of some expensive looking building - afraid whoever may be able to look in can and will. It’s sort of biting you in the ass now though because you can’t see a goddamn thing, the thick peach fabric shut close together, shielding even the tint of the turquoise walls. You’re running strictly on muscle memory as Gustavo practically bulldozes you through the tiled lounge area and into the bedroom, brushing past glass coffee tables and deep seated barrel chairs that match the turquoise paint. 

Heat roils over you in waves, your body answering with a coiling buzz of anticipation thrumming in the pit of your stomach, some much different than you had felt out on the beach. You almost forget the slight dip as you descend into the room - a few stairs (like two, which seem entirely useless and unnecessarily dangerous) - but Gustavo catches you, huffs a sort of laugh, and whispers to you a warning that sounds far too entertained to _be careful._

It turns your blood syrupy anyway. He smells like cherry cigars, of ocean and beach wood and sea salt and a little like laundry detergent and his aftershave and you’re reminded yet again about how encompassing he is, how overwhelming - how you let every bit of him stay seeping into your pores, congealing your bones, making you so in love with him that you constantly feel like a universe of exploding stars. 

The thing about ignorance, you figure, is that it _feels good._ Symbolically a warm basket of clothes. The stretch of your toes after a long day on your feet. The first bite of your favorite meal. That kind of good. Comfortable. Cultivated. Easy to slip into when everything else is being thrown at you in unbreachable and massed tides. That’s what you do - you slip - away from the violence and unforgivable truth into something like _this_ \- when you can’t face yourself or the decisions you’ve made, the ones _he’s_ made. You let yourself be enraptured in the cocoon of his body, in the mess of blankets and pillows piled on the bed in the room that he’s paying for with money funneled from a business that is _so very fucking illegal_ and getting people killed everyday. You let yourself bask in the vagueness of it - let your common sense shatter, pretend that these are things you don’t need to concern yourself with; these are just sheets, this hotel is just a hotel, the beach just a beach. He’s just a man. _(blue)_ And you - 

You’re just a kid.

“No sabes cuánto me encanta tu coño.” 

No, he’s wrong. You know exactly how much he loves it - his need for it this morning, this afternoon, now tonight. Almost anytime you’re alone. It’s kind of thrilling the hold you have over him, makes your blood sing, excitement like electricity making you nearly want to squeal with the sadistic pleasure of it - to have a man so powerful, so able-bodied and broad-shouldered and impending twisted around the fingers of your sexuality. 

But…

“Why don’t you show me, huh?” You gasp, grinding back against his cock as much as his grip will allow. His shorts and the flimsy silk of your robe do very little to shield either of you from the sinful drag of it, and Gustavo groans - hot and wrecked and dripping like honey and you don’t make it to the bed, should have seen it coming because you know what happens when you push him like this, so you’re up against the wall and bracing yourself, splaying your palms against the cool, slightly textured plaster, looking at him from over your shoulder and smiling like a goddamn _brat._

“Careful or I’ll show you how to use that mouth.” He threatens, nipping at your ear. You know it’s a promise - that rarely does he ever take back his word, so right now you’ve got a decision to make and your belly dance with butterflies, the jittery rush of skating on thin ice making you giggle because either way - getting him mad or not - you’ll be winning. 

“You promise?” You bite your bottom lip and your eyes flash, go dark and heated and it hits him _hard_ , his cock jolting in his pants and - 

The ice shatters. _(red)._

His response is immediate, in a matter of fucking seconds, his fingers - _so thick and long and masculine and so fucking filthy_ \- climb up the back of your skull and make a fist, his grip bordering just on the cusp of too tight, almost painful. And he uses your hair as leverage to keep you pinned, his knee and then the meat of his thigh pushing your legs apart until you’re stood slightly lower than you were, his cock against your lower back. Gustavo tugs your head back, speaks between gritted teeth a warning that should be absolutely fucking spine-chilling but all it does is make your cunt clench around nothing. “Watch your fucking tongue, baby.” 

Then he’s pulling you closer, kissing you like a lover before pushing into your mouth and scraping his tongue over your teeth. His free hand slips underneath your robe, calloused and familiar, the silk pooling at his wrist as he climbs higher - higher and higher, brushing against your bare skin until your ass is exposed to the temperate climate of the room. He sucks in a breath, exhales something you don’t quite catch, and you’re about to whine at the loss of his touch when it suddenly comes back - a sharp sting, enough to make your eyes water and send you bucking towards the wall, but you’re moaning into his mouth anyway, mewling nonsense, caught between placating him for forgiveness and egging him on. 

Gustavo lets the pain fade, imagines in the darkness how red and raw you must be already, pink in a whole body flush. You’re so pretty, always so pretty - in a way that makes his gut constrict, makes him want to protect and demolish you, possess and defend and take and take simultaneously. Unhealthy, crippling feelings that someone as young and naive as you shouldn’t be able to pull from him - shouldn’t be participating in, either. But who’s he to decide what’s good or bad, though. What’s healthy or not. 

“Gustav-” His name dies in your esophagus, railroaded by the groan that his final swat elicits. Your body feels inflamed, unstable and all you can do is paw at the wall and try to look at him, pleading with wide and shiny eyes for him to fuck you already. 

The ache of it hurts, makes you twist your hips and try to shift your weight in an effort to relieve just a little bit of it, a sentient sort of vibration that is torturous with its intensity - angry with nothing to relieve it. This is both your favorite and most hated part about fucking him - the buildup, the torture, waiting for him to finally give you want you want, more often than not through big piles of tears, your frustration and desperation and love for him all bundled together in a fucking mess that you’re not at all able to digest or pick apart when he’s got his fingers circling your clit and his other hand around his cock, so all you can do is sob - cry until he shows some mercy or touches you with a little more purpose; _something, anything._

“You ready to talk nice, niñita? Next time I won’t be as forgiving.” 

You choke on air and the spit in your mouth, unable to really answer him with something coherent, so you nod as much as you can with his fist still in your hair, hoping it’s enough. Desire curls and slivers throughout your body, gathering in your belly, in the marrow of your bones, kissing each vertebrae of your spine until it reaches your skull, then morphing into something electrical and piercing in the spaces between his fingers. You’d let him touch you all the time if you could, sure you’d never tire of the feeling. 

And it hits you that you’d wait for just as long, too. In Panama, on some beach you’d never heard of, and in Colombia, tucked away in house number whatever with its stone tiles and impersonal furniture. 

You’d wait and you’d wait and you’d wait - loving him for twice as long as it took. 

“That wasn’t an answer.” 

It takes everything in you to function past the operating of your brain stem - to think the words and feel them in your mouth and then actually say them, but you do - whine and let the tumble like rolling stones - and he grins, satisfied, and calls you a _good girl._

Gustavo reaches around you and undoes your robe, releases you from his hold to brush the fabric away from your shoulders, slowly, creeping, exposing inch by inch the soft skin of your back. The tenderness doesn’t last - is gone just as swiftly as it had appeared - and once the robe is off your body completely he’s grabbing you by the curve where your elbows bend, tugging them backwards and then together, half-yanking you upwards until your back is arched and the peaks of your nipples brush against the plaster. 

“Gonna give you what you want, nena. I know that you’re sorry.” 

Your neck is beginning to hurt with the strain of turning it to look at him, but you don’t care - you aren’t focused on it, not really - too enraptured in him. You look just in time to see him pull his cock out of his shorts, thick and leaking precum, heavy and curving in his fist in a way that has your muscles locking, legs buckling just enough that if you weren’t braced against the wall, you would have stumbled forward. The atrophy is only worsened by the palm that moves across your hip and along your pubic bone, then between your legs. The first substantial touch of the night, a sensation that’s not nearly enough yet too much in a way that has you squirming - not sure if you’re trying to get away or get closer. “ _Please, Gustavo_.”

He’s keeping you in place, rendering you unable to do anything other than take it - completely at his mercy, even as he pushes in with one long, slow stroke, the tethers of his own self-control beginning to break. A soft whine of pleasure and relief springs from your lips and you tilt your head back on your own accord, leaning against his shoulder, squeezing your eyes shut as he bottoms out and he’s -

_He’s fuck -_

He’s _big,_ more than that even because he makes you feel full - like you’re about to split right open, stretched and taut and trying not to buck backwards or away and there’s something hopelessly, helplessly erotic and carnal about the way he curves against your back, still holding you straight by your arms. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve fucked you’ll never get used to the sensation. 

Gustavo kisses you again, rumbles beneath his breath about how fucking tight you are, how good your cunt feels, all plump lips and snarled teeth, nipping and biting and invading. Then his fingers are crawling up the front of your body, travelling up the valley between your breasts, over your collarbones, before finally encasing your throat. You keen, roll your bottom lip between your teeth as he rests his thumb against the pulsing, pounding artery at the base of your neck. It makes you feel like you’re suffocating, your breaths coming out in little gasps against his chin, Gustavo still assaulting your lips amid each pretty little moan. 

Very vaguely, somewhere fogged and weighed down, you register that you’re not going to be able to take much more, that when he starts moving you might collapse inward on yourself like a dying star. Little sparks of pleasure bubble somewhere deep beneath your breastplate, making you inhale and hold your breath - repeating again and again, compounded by his hand against your neck and it takes everything in you not to surrender yourself completely to it because he already makes you cum embarrassingly fast and you want this - for whatever it might be or is - to last. There’s no telling what’ll happen once you’re all back in Colombia, if this will still be a thing _(a relationship?)_. You want to savor it all. 

“God - you feel so fucking good, baby.” He grunts, finding a slow, nearly painful rhythm that makes your toes curl against the floor. 

You could sink into and swim around in his voice forever, in just that sentence alone. Let him take over your entire life if he wanted to, just as long as he keeps making you feel like _this._

Sweat beads at the pinpoints your body’s connect - his shoulder to your back, forearm arm now wrapped around your middle, fingers digging into your waist, his other hand still around your neck, the warmth of your combined efforts heady and smoldering, Gustavo’s breath ghosts hot across your collarbones as he moves and you roll your hips to meet him and with your hands finally free, you reach for him, gripping his hip with one and twisting the dark waves at the back of his neck with the other. Your noses bump, his forehead against your own, and you force yourself to swallow past the wave of intimacy that hits you - the wave of affection and the heartache of active loss. You don’t have the energy to kiss him, or to even try, left gasping against his lips and drinking his answering groans. He still feels impossibly big and each drag of his cock gets more sinful, more aggressive and needy and it knocks the wind out of you, makes the desperation inside of you to cum all the more intense. 

Everything is messy, a little off-balanced and crooked and you can feel yourself beginning to spiral - you just need more pressure, something else, a few swift circles against your clit and that would be it and you no longer care about dragging this out. You need him to make you cum so bad that you feel like you might burst with the want of it. 

“No more teasing, Gustavo. Please no more.” You repine, tripping over your words trying to get everything out all at once so he won’t ask you to repeat it. You won’t be able to, won’t be able to handle the task of saying it again because everything is _too much_ \- all of it - how he fucks you, pelvis slamming into the cradle of your thighs, the head of his cock catching something soft and electric inside you, ripping a broken moan from just below your rib cage; how your life is about to change for like, the fucking six-thousandth time, how all you want to do is _love him and be loved_ , how that feel of emptiness and dread still hasn’t gone away - only lies dormant until this is over. 

And he must sense that in your voice, or at least a little bit of it, or maybe he’s just as high-strung as you are because he finds the bundle of nerves between your legs and rubs it in tight little circles and suddenly your entire abdomen feels tight, your muscles trembling and your pussy clenching around him in a way that must fucking hurt because you can’t control yourself anymore - overwhelmed, unable to make any noise at all as the world goes hot and white and _blinding._

He doesn’t fucking stop either, keeps going until you’re a mess against him - weak boned and limp, supported only by his chest and the wall and the noises you make are harsh now, flashing flares of venomous pleasure shooting up your spine in-between every agonizing wave of hyper-stimulation. 

“You look so pretty, baby. I know you’ve got another one.” Gustavo kisses your cheek and you could cry - _do cry_ \- devastated and overworked, your chest aching and the lump in your throat growing. And when he wipes the tears away as they reach the curve of your jaw with the pad of his thumb you _wail_ , call out his name like it belongs to God, grasping behind you at any part of him you can and _he still doesn’t fucking stop_ ; coos his praise and mild condescension into the shell of your ear, continuing to rub at your slick clit, his fingers coated shiny with it and when you cum again its like you’ve been pierced by a blade, stabbed with the sudden and terse ferocity of it. 

Gustavo laughs, low and rough and dark, keeps fucking you like he could go on forever and then he’s choking your name, rhythm faltering and his breath catching and you know he isn’t going to last much longer, not like this, so you don’t flinch at the way his fingers tighten around your throat, constrict your airway as he falters and slows and gives one, two, three more thrusts before groaning, pulling out to watch his seed drip down your legs. 

The room is still. Quiet. And you blink, let Gustavo push the hair out of your face and turn you slowly, kiss you slowly too, and cup your cheeks. When he leans away the world has returned, solid and unwavering, and you can hear the sounds of the waves as they continue to lap at the sand, ever patient and constant. 

“I don’t want to have this argument again.” He speaks, sounding far too loud but you don’t mind because it’s him talking, him breaking the silence. 

“I go wherever you go.” You answer, not really an affirmation or a promise to his request and even though it’s never been a question of your loyalty, you want him to know this, to hear it coming from you. 

He’s silent. You’re silent, too. Life could go on like this, stuck in an infinite loop. 

“Because you love me?” Gustavo pinches your chin between his fingers gently and your gazes meet, exchanging words without saying them as he drags his thumb across your bottom lip. 

“Because I love you.” 

Because you shouldn’t. Because you can’t think of doing anything else. Because you’re young. 

He sighs, brings you to him and rests your head against his chest and you wish that you had access to his thoughts, knew what he was thinking right now. 

After a while he leads you to the bathroom, tugs the rest of his clothes off and turns on the hot water, and you clean each other - careful, tender, a side of him not most ever get to see slipping to the surface behind the fogged up glass. 

And you go to bed feeling like you’ve plucked at your own feathers, raw and exposed crawling beneath the sheets, curling against his side. 

Like you’ve made a big fucking mistake. 

Like you’re about to pay for it. 

But it doesn’t matter because he’s painted you in a delicate, calming _(yellow)._


	3. bring me your heart/i'll teach it to break

You wake up squinting. 

The heavy curtains do their best to shut out beams of the morning sun, save for where the panels fail to meet in the middle; unnoticeable last night for many reasons - now impossible to miss, star-shine streaming from the bright blue, cloudless sky and through the window, reflecting off the tiled patio still wet with puddles of rainwater, the simmering sand, and through the glass into the room like a spotlight. Rays of it in thin columns touch the air, making it more substantial, coming alive with particles and dust and other invisible flying things that swirl around within your vision. 

You blink, trying to get your eyes to adjust, then end up closing them again because it hurts; fatigue weighing down your eyelids, burning with slight irritation and sleep. 

You’re exhausted, emotionally and physically. After falling into bed, you had glided into unconsciousness easily, not content but satisfied enough with the warmth of Gustavo’s body pressed against your back and the knowledge that you’ve still got a day here, a day away from travelling and danger, but then you’d suddenly jerk awake as if something had happened before nodding off again. As if you were walking through a plate-glass window, waking each time you were about to fall - over and over, stuck in these interstices between sleeping and waking, floating in a dark transitive space that wasn’t quite dreaming, but perpetually on the edge of becoming one, hanging submerged and tumbling slowly, vaguely aware of your surroundings as the night progressed. 

Like the quiet hum and rattle of the air conditioning unit, long and shielded by off-white plastic just beneath the windows, breathing cold air into the room. The rumblings of clouds, not quite close enough to be intimidating but getting closer, somewhere off in the horizon of the beach, the water becoming choppy and dark. The quiet exhales of Gustavo’s breathing. The slide of your limbs against the sheets as you tried to get comfortable. 

So maybe it’s the bleariness in which you woke, or his body pressed to your body, but you can feel the room shifting, no longer familiar - it’s shapes obtuse and distorted, melted and curved and sloping. Objects you were sure were once solid beginning to dissolve and spin. Sort of like vertigo, a ringing in your ears like they’ve been filled with water and have yet to drain, but you’re the one standing still while everything else is spinning. An uncomfortable unfamiliarity. You know these things, know their names, but they are no more to you than things that are fleeting - like everything else, like your last house, like your last hotel room. 

It had rained last night and hard, pellets of water hitting against the window, and when you were finally able to dream it was fitful - full of dark shapes and confusing images conjured up by your petrified subconscious - a consequence of refusing to face the reality of your situation and your emotions head on. You can’t recall most of it, just the vague, semi-solid shapes, the feelings - visions of moonlight pouring onto shingles of red clay roofed buildings, swaying in a crystal, dappling swimming pool illuminated four on each pool wall by white LEDs, the floating transparency of grey cigarette smoke; swapped, then, for the outlines of people, of what you recognized to be Pablo’s mother’s house, sitting at her kitchen table, getting ready to do something, then being hit with an overwhelming sense of dread - as if you, caught in this reality, were frozen, unable to do anything as the feeling mounted, just on the cusp of something terrible, something irredeemable, like the crest of a wave always about to break. 

But before it could become anything more, you’d wake up, repeating the cycle of interrupted sleep until finally it was broken for good by the high morning daylight. 

Gustavo shifts behind you, exhales a noise of obvious discomfort as he rolls onto his back, away from the sun, and you’re caught between letting him know you’re up and laying here for a little while longer - tucked among the sheets and pillows, hidden away from the world and the shit that lives in it because if your heart is any measure you aren’t ready to face even a quarter of what’s to come yet. 

“We should get up,” he speaks gently, past a voice full of stones - rough and hoarse with sleep, dry sounding and you swallow instinctively at the feel of it in your head, feeling guilty that you wish he weren’t awake, even as he reaches over and slips his hand between the pillows and your head and kneads the nape of your neck, affectionate, loving. You’ve always liked his hands. Big. Strong. Capable. Even his fingertips are calloused; skin built up from a childhood lived back and forth between mountains, from counting bills, from tapping against a trigger, but they’re smooth too, and for as convoluted as the way it makes you feel, it’s comforting. 

The room is quiet, then, his words hanging in the air, dangling from the ceiling waiting to be fulfilled. You can hear the ocean as it brushes up against the sand, and can picture it still turbulent with residues of last night’s storm, foamy and aggressive, the jelly-fish and seaweed heaved up onto the beach by the tide left to dry out. Striped beach chairs and umbrellas upturned, seagulls circling. People are talking outside, Pablo’s bodyguards, male voices just above you on their balcony, not loud enough for you to decipher any of what they’re saying, but clear enough that you can get the tone of it, so instead of thinking about your would-be nightmare, you try to come up with what they might be saying - discussing plans for the day, their hangovers and headaches, sentences interrupted by the quick flick of a lighter igniting and a cigarette being placed between their lips, conversations that won’t stray towards amnesty and murder or politicians and cocaine. 

You’re realizing now that Pablo had bought out the place. That the children and families you saw yesterday, dragging in sand and laughing, had all gone home. The last vestiges of normalcy gone. You pluck the sheets in frustration. 

“Soon, niñita. I know you’re awake.” 

Gustavo pulls away, swings his legs around the bed and runs his fingers through his hair, his movements weary and robotic. You feel the mattress dip as he stands, hear the clang of his watch against wood as he tosses it onto the nightstand, followed by his bracelet and his ring, then his footsteps as they retreat towards the bathroom. There’s the noise of the pipes coming to life, then the rush of running water fills the room after. The bed already feels colder without him in it, but you’re hesitant to follow - hesitant to do anything at all, knowing it’ll set the day’s course into motion. 

You move to lay on your back and stare up at the white, textured ceiling, eyes following the curves of subtle seashells, one hand resting lightly against your collarbone, the other on your stomach, rising and falling with your breathing, listening to the sounds of the shower. 

You wouldn’t have to go with him, back to Colombia, or anywhere at all if you didn’t want to. You could leave right now, just grab your things and go - sell some of your jewelry to pay for a taxi and a plane ticket and just…be gone. No more danger. No more secrets. No more hiding. Not that you’d ever do that. Ever just leave Gustavo. Although it makes you feel better to tell yourself that you’ve got the privilege of choosing - of choices, no one’s ever out of this life, not really. They’d find you. _He’d_ find you. Eventually - maybe not right away; maybe weeks or months down the line, when the dust is settling and you’ve got your new life figured out, serving tequila and finger-fulls of whiskey to regulars who don’t know your real name, ignoring the gradual erosion of your happiness and no longer catching glimpses of him in the dim lighting of the bar, but still, though, finally able to feel like you aren’t suffocating with your grief. That’s when it would happen. That’s when you’d be dragged back down. Standing in one place for long enough is dangerous, knowing he’d show up. 

And maybe you’d be shown some mercy. Probably not. 

But what happens if both of you are lost? And end up in the same place waiting? 

You’d never actually do it. You’ve loved him too much and for too long, even if every moment with him feels like you’ve climbed to the highest point in a tree only to suddenly feel the branch give way. 

Your thoughts are interrupted by the signal of your name, muffled slightly by the beating water, floating from somewhere behind the steamed up, frosted blue-tinted glass. Gustavo, calling out to you, asking you to join him. 

You sit up, blink as the blankets pool around your waist, and look around the room; behind you at the lamp and decorative vases filled with blue and translucent marbles that rest on the flat counter serving as a headboard, at the flowers on the table near the window, then in front of you at the open bathroom, only able to make out Gustavo’s fogged silhouette as he stands beneath the shower-head. 

He says your name again. 

Your blood fevers at the sound. You’d risk pain and prison for that voice. You’d risk yourself. 

_I go wherever you go._

_Because you shouldn’t. Because you can’t think of doing anything else. Because you’re young._

_Because you love him._

And love is a crooked thing - imperfect, confusing, hard to understand. Love makes people do stupid things. It makes them think stupid thoughts, do stupid actions, say stupid words. 

So you go, like you always do, and resolutely stifle whatever other thoughts and daydreams wanted to make themselves known. 

You step into the bathroom, the tile cold on your bare feet.

“Good morning,” you say softly, voice rasping, your toes wiggling against the bathmat as Gustavo slides the glass open, helping you step inside. 

“Good morning,” he greets back, switching with you so that you can step underneath the hot water. You close your eyes and tilt your head back, feeling calm for the first time since waking up, washing over you like a giant, warm quilt had been settled around your shoulders, the molecules around you aligned and pacified neatly, a startling contrast to the way you had felt in bed - cold and alone and desperate for different circumstances. Gustavo’s got a way of doing that - of making things feel better even though they aren’t. He’s got a way of doing a lot of things. 

Like putting a massive crack in your consciousness, increasingly sending tremors in your morality, becoming the very thing that cause these huge, gaping chasms in which you wake up in the mornings flinching, somehow disillusioned yet not at all to the fact that you’re living life like a ghost - caught between two worlds. 

You wonder if he would have been more gentle if he knew he was going to break you like this. 

You can feel him watching you, though, firmly planting you in this reality, so you smile just a little - letting yourself bathe in the warmth that it gives, radiating through your chest and into your fingers as you tilt your head back into the stream of water. 

The water is hot, sinks you further into your exhaustion, and so you exhale, try to let go of what’s bothering you and - 

“You look tired, nena.” His hand, solid and warm, lands on your hip, his sleepy words like dripping honey. You ignore it, reach for the bottle of shampoo, trying not to think too much about his observation, fingers skimming over the top before popping the plastic lid open with a clack that sounds too loud against the shower walls. 

“You kept me awake.” You answer, truer than he probably realizes. 

Gustavo reaches for the shampoo, takes it away before you can use it and sets it back down on the shelf. 

“I want the real reason.” 

You open your eyes and push your hair away from your face, let him tug you closer, out from under the spray. Droplets of water run down your face, drip onto your chest from your nose and chin, to your feet. There’s the obvious reason, you think, and you consider answering with that like you already have, but you also know he wouldn’t be bringing it up if that’s all he thought it was - he’s too smart for that, knows you too well. 

There’s nothing for a few seconds save for the rhythmic beating of the water no longer blocked by your body against the tiles. 

“I didn’t sleep well last night.” You say it softly, quietly, almost embarrassed as the sentence breaks through the humid air, becoming something more solid and concrete. 

Gustavo exhales and searches your face but you know that what he’s looking for he’s already found - knowing because he always knows when it comes to you, but he won’t immediately bring it up - he’ll try to work it out of you, allow you to really tell him if that’s what you want knowing you can’t stand the idea of disappointing him by lying. 

“Was it the rain?” 

You had no idea he was up for that - if you had woken him or not, but guilt still tugs at your stomach anyway. It’s alright if you lose some sleep because you aren’t doing much of anything most days, but you don’t like the thought of him being exhausted - exhaustion leads to mistakes, to spikes in anger and irrational thoughts. He’s usually level headed, usually the peacemaker, yet the thought of him getting himself hurt because of fatigue still secures roots in your mind and now you can’t let go of it, can’t shake the fear that because you kept him awake, it would have disastrous consequences. 

“No, it wasn’t the rain.” You reach for the shampoo bottle again but he catches your wrist, sliding his fingers up so that his thumb rests in the middle of your palm. 

“Then what, niñita?” 

You hesitate. He looks at you with raised eyebrows, gaze soft yet demanding. 

“I was having bad dreams.” 

Gustavo blinks, looks away from you briefly and lets go of your wrist to scrub the lower half of his face as if it’ll help him understand.

“Bad dreams?” He repeats, finding your gaze again. 

“I don’t know. I don’t really remember what they were about, just that I was afraid.” 

Gustavo nods, brings his hand to your shoulder, then to your face to cup your cheek, tracing your cupid’s bow with his thumb. 

“Afraid of what?” 

You aren’t sure. You haven’t been able to identify what exactly had terrified you, just that it involved him. You won’t be able to articulate it now - not with him standing in front of you, looking at you like that, expecting an answer. 

“I don’t know…” 

You’re both quiet. You can sense Gustavo’s frustration. You change the subject. 

“What happens after we land?” You go for the soap again and Gustavo lets you, watching as you pour some of it into your palm then begin to wash your hair. He steps forward, fingers on your scalp - startling intimate, fingertips careful and light and dragging, setting your skin alight with goosebumps. 

He exhales. 

“A few of Pablo’s men will be there to greet us with cars, we’ll put our shit in the trunks then if it’s safe, we go to one of his properties.” 

“If it’s safe?” 

Gustavo’s hands stop, moves to your cheek once more. 

Fear is a crawling itch. It never ceases, only seems to grow in its intensity, in it’s severeness - feels like it can only be relieved by the shedding of your skin, the kind of sensation where all you can do is scratch and scratch and scratch until it’s no longer an itch; until it’s no longer this thing that irritates but this oozing, bloody mess, raw and painful in a newly terrifying way, fingernails bright as cherries and covered in flesh and altogether worse than it ever was before - 

But at least it doesn’t fucking itch anymore. 

And his words are the balm. 

“ _It will be_ \- just a precaution, nena.” 

You’ll just have to take his word for it. You reach for him, place your hands around the forearm attached to the palm that cups your cheek as if touching him would solidify the comfort, make it more permanent. “Then what?” 

“Then…life goes on like it always has,” He says like it’s nothing - like it’s true. “Nothing changes for you.” 

Save for your surroundings, save for your things, your houses and hotel rooms and paintings and furniture. 

He can’t actually believe that. You remember how he was on the beach. Life won’t be the same, it can’t be; not after what Pablo did. 

“Oh.” 

“Relax, niñita. You’ll be alright.” 

You want to believe him - want to believe him so bad that you almost don’t say anything, almost hold your tongue, almost stay quiet like you always are even though it may make you fucking resent him eventually because maybe you’d be able to withstand hating him because loving him is painful enough - what’s a little more heartache? 

Except you don’t want that, not really. You want to go on loving him without all the fucking catches. 

“But what if something does happen, Gustavo. We’re already running because of something he did. Now the Americans are becoming more involved. And if they can’t get to Pablo, they’re going to do everything they can to hurt him. Do you know what that means?” 

“Listen to me carefully. Never say this to Pablo. Or Tata. Do you understand?” 

You shift your gaze from him and nod, clenching your jaw in an attempt to take your focus away from the anger that’s building hot and corrosive in your solar plexus. You know immediately that this conversation won’t be like the one you had last night, or nights before it - playful and a little sweet and skirting around the subject. 

“I’m taking care of it.” He adds, not quite so much because he feels the need to say it but because he knows you need to hear it. 

“I don’t know what that means,” you scoff, not angry but drained. “I don’t think you do either. Pablo clearly doesn’t listen, not anymore.” 

Maybe that’s what love is - choking sounds and silence. Moments spent subduing. Subverting. Changing the subject. 

_Relax, niñita_ , he says. Relax because the things you lost in Hacienda Nápoles were replaced. Relax because it wasn’t you that was kidnapped. Relax because Pablo will get rid of Carrillo. Relax because everything will be calm later. 

Relax.

Isn’t he afraid to die? 

Relax.

No. Probably not. 

Relax. 

But he can let you be afraid for him, right? 

“What do you want, nena? What would you have me do?” Echoes of past conversations come rising to the surface. You wish he’d stop because you don’t have a real answer - not one that he’ll take seriously and actually consider, not one that won’t just make you look like some desperate fool strung out on his love and affection, fearful for his life because he seems incapable of being so himself. 

“Why do you have to ask me that?” That’s what you are, though. A pitiful idiot. 

Gustavo removes his hand from you, grips the top of the shower door so tight that his knuckles turn a lighter shade, his other curled at his side. He’s leaning closer to you, encroaching on your space, but with nowhere to go you’re left with your back to the running water and his body in front of you. His medallion catches the light and the irony of it now steals your breath. He’ll receive great graces, but what is he taking from you? 

“Why shouldn’t I? Do you have an answer, nena? Am I supposed to guess?” 

“Stop it, Gustavo.” 

He ignores you and keeps talking. 

“You know the thing that has me worried, niñita?” 

“No, Gustavo. I-” You wish he wouldn’t push you like this, wish he wouldn’t get so mean trying to prove a point. 

“You.” 

“Me?” 

“ _Yes_ , you. You are handling things very badly.” 

“I’m not-” 

“You think I haven’t noticed?” 

You clench your teeth to keep the tears from coming, your throat getting tight and the inside of your nose beginning to prickle. 

“Gustavo-” 

“No, no, don’t give me that dumb shit. You can’t have it both ways. You say you want to run away, go someplace else…so tell me, nena, what would you have me do? Where would we go? Because whether you like it or not, niñita, this business pays for your dresses, for your shoes, your makeup, your-” 

“I said stop it, Gustavo!” You sneer. He instantly quiets only to brace himself. 

You start shoving at his chest, at first to get him to move backwards but then you just kept going, slapping and hitting at any place you can reach, speaking words and saying nonsense even you could barely understand as he stands there and lets you do it, occasionally swatting away your fingers or your wrists, but otherwise letting you go on and on with your grief and frustration and he’s so much bigger, so much stronger that he could just take a hold of you and stop it completely but he doesn’t - aware that this isn’t only about him, that he’s the only one you’re able to take it out on because you trust him, until he finally gets fed up with it, senses you’re only going to hurt yourself, so he snatches your hands and tugs you forward, sending you tumbling into his body. 

You want to keep going, to howl, to scream and freak out and throw a tantrum because maybe if you act pathetic enough he’ll take pity on you, feel sorry and do as you ask, but you know it’ll never work. You know that and yet -

“Enough.” 

You avoid his gaze, stare at some fixed point in the white grout, unsure if your face is wet from the shower or from your tears, trying to speak as clearly as you can through the lump in your throat. 

“They’ll kill him. You know that.” You say carefully, softly. “I just hope he doesn’t take you down with him.” 

You rip yourself out of his grasp and swing the shower door open, the edge of it clattering against the wall, the sound abrupt and nearly violent in the otherwise sharp quiet that sets your teeth on edge. 

He doesn’t stop you, watches you rip a towel out of the linen closet and wrap it around your body, water pooling in every place that you step.

You see him walk into darkness over and over and over again. Always gentle. Always caring. And you are _tired_. And you are unwilling to let him go down with and for a man that’s losing his fucking mind. But every time it feels like you’re speaking into dead air - like you’re praying and pleading and begging to God and don’t know why it feels like nothing, why you feel a little more empty and hollow instead of fulfilled or placated or _blessed_ \- desperate to be the light in his shade and not just in the darkness with him. 

Your first conversation with Gustavo about this was the first time you remembered thinking that words are just words - that they don’t inherently have meaning, or value, or anything else at all to make them solid unless someone gives them that meaning, so what does it mean when an empty person speaks with empty words - when the syllables are notched and striated and fruitless and there’s a lack. What happens to them when you just want to give up? 

Your name is just a word, too, as he calls it out to your back. 

The water shuts off. You walk towards the dresser anyway, searching through them without really paying attention. 

You catch his reflection in the mirror, drying his hair, and your heart surges with affection before you’re able to stifle it; your lungs and chest expanding, the love you have for him like the pressure that builds in your head when you’re about to cry, resting just above the roof of your mouth and behind your eyes. 

So you stop, look down and wrinkle a shirt between your fingers. 

“Come here.” He says gently, walking closer to you. You look back up at him, frustrated, unwilling to do what he asks because you’re hurt and you’re pissed. “ _Come._ _Here_.” 

He sighs, stands behind you and for a second all you can feel is the warmth of his body once again against your back. 

“Stop crying.” Gustavo turns you to face him, tucks your hair away from your face. “It’s you and me, baby, hm? Are you listening?” 

You nod, wrapping your arms around him, clinging to him as if somehow his calm would seep into you; as if you’re trying to force your body into being comforted, the feeling of him solid and warm - his muscle and bone and skin against your skin and muscle and bone, but most of all the _pressure_ of it, reminding you of something you read once about the nervous system - where it can be tricked into relaxing by applying force, uncomfortable and suffocating at first, but as time goes on soothing, pacifying. 

He tilts your head up, kisses your forehead, then your eyes, then your lips - long and sweet and slow. 

He wishes it were that easy. That he could just leave the way you want him to. You know. You know and yet you are sure of your anger, and the grief that had kept you quiet. 

“Get dressed. We’re going somewhere.” 


	4. i lost something in the hills

You get dressed slowly, deliberately, watching yourself through the mirror. 

It’s an odd sort of balance, existing so intimately within yourself that you feel constantly hyper-aware of every move you make, every word out of your mouth, and so far away from your consciousness that sometimes whole moments, entire conversations, warm, breezy evenings and dark blue nights spent laying against silk sheets happen within a blink of your eyelids. Time passing unregistered. 

Your life in fragments - snapshots of Important things - Serious things - Things that would make a younger you so devastated and traumatized she’d probably never forgive you for what you’ve done to her. 

Would make her scream and cry and panic wondering what her life was coming to, if it was destined to be lived long enough to come to anything at all, to worry about that kind of thing after you’ve made her associate with a man like Gustavo - with _men_ like him - men that weigh down their souls, bloody their hands, then touch her with them like they aren’t painting her in streaks of red, making her guilty with every palm-print. 

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? That you’re still so young, you’re still that girl, you’re still left screaming at him to listen, _to please be gentle with my heart, it hasn’t learned to be mean yet, it hasn’t learned to fight back._

But as you tug the shirt you had worried and wrinkled in your hands over your head, ignoring or maybe just not even noticing the way your damp hair soaks the collar, you meet your own gaze in the mirror and realize that it wouldn’t have mattered if you had chosen to say this to him, to beg, because he wouldn’t be able to understand. He has left you to rot - to fester, to decay, to become something ugly and wholly unrecognizable - so it’s no wonder that he can’t hear you, can’t see the last vestiges of yourself in the cavities in which you’ve collapsed inward, because you can’t see them either. 

You mess with the wet fabric, squeeze it between your pointer finger and thumb, blink at yourself in the glass. All that comes out is water. Just water. You look away. Bend to grab your wet towel. Hear the door open and close with a hurried, sudden click. 

Gustavo returns from the hallway, dressed already, rings and bracelet and watch decorating his hands, catching in the light as he pushes down the antennae of his radio phone, then again as he stuffs the device into a duffel bag he had pulled out from under the bed. 

“Change of plans, nena.” 

“Who was that?” You should be used to this by now, you resent the way stupid questions pass your lips so easily still. 

He ignores it, grabs the bag by its straps and carries it over to the other side of the room, opening the white sliding closet doors, tearing articles of clothing off their hangers then stuffing them, unfolded and messy, inside. 

“Start packing.” 

Gustavo reaches forward, grabs another satchel from the closet. You follow him with your eyes, watch as he walks over to you and holds it out for you to take. 

You look at him, trying to understand. 

“Where are we going?” Your hands reach out and grasp the straps uneasily. He’s supposed to be taking you somewhere nice - somewhere you’d be able to relax, let you breathe for five seconds without worrying where your next inhale was coming from - at least that’s the way he made it seem, but whatever that phone conversation had been about has undone everything, more than you possibly know. 

“Home.” A quickly spoken answer, one he doesn’t quite realize fast forwards your timeline, makes you panic. You were supposed to have one more day. 

He goes back to what he was doing, turning to look over his shoulder at you when he notices that you’re still standing, not moving, looking at him like he harbors all the answers when really he just wants you to stop asking questions and do as he’s said. 

“What?” Your tone is soft, broken, left caught in the middle of his hurried flurry of his movements that do little to thinly veil his annoyance - not directed at you, at least not entirely - but at someone else. 

“Please, nena. We don’t have time for this.” 

“I still don’t understand. What’s happening, Gustavo?” 

“Your things. _Now_.” 

The sun is bright, hits the drying pavement and bounces off of it in a way that makes you squint, eye struggling to adjust as you follow Gustavo out through the hallway, through the lobby, surpassing the checkout desk entirely, then finally to a row of idling cars. Men you don’t recognize - boys more like it, some of them looking no older than nineteen - jump out immediately, take your things with polite smiles, greeting you with a respect that feels strange and foreign and uncomfortable.

Aways in the distance, the beach is empty save for the swarming of seagulls. The sky is endlessly blue, beautiful and empty, and you envy how last night it got to fill itself with loud and angry clouds, was able to lash out and destroy and endanger, ruin things and make the ocean turbulent without anyone looking at it any differently, without the fear of it losing something vital and important. You had let go only minutely this morning, but you had been stifled, quieted by a pair of hands gentle only for you. You wonder if the sky has ever been in love. If it’s ever let itself be shushed. Stayed quiet, mellowed, for the love of a man. 

Probably not, you think as you get into the car. It was man who made sacrifices to please her, right? 

The tarmac sweats - sun rays reflecting off the black surface, exhaust from the jet adding to the waves that squiggle in invisible lines from the engines where the fumes are getting caught in the heat, against the ground and in the air. Everything is still so bright, so saturated in color. You look at Gustavo, see him squinting even behind his aviators. You notice that being around him is like constantly being bathed in tangerines and blood red and smeared pinks; aggressive colors, warm. Shades that you can only look at for moments at a time. 

You don’t think about the colors in between - the colors for fleeting emotions, the all encompassing blinding emptiness of sterile white, the color of the jet, the effuse and radiance of sunburst orange, the color behind your eyelids when you’re around him. It’s too much to focus on, too much to process the way unbearably brilliant warm days can get, when all you can do is try not to get overwhelmed by it. 

So you think about the time he had taken you out to dinner. You had been able to blend in with the people easily, ushered by Gustavo into some bustling little restaurant tucked between buildings, sat down next to a wide window right against the street, fans tucked hidden away in spaces between the arched wooden ceiling turning slowly. You think about how easily he had smiled, slanted and youthful and relaxed. You think about how he had leaned back in his chair, sunglasses tucked into the pocket of his shirt - some flimsy fabric with the first four buttons undone, and looked at you - _really looked_ \- head turned as if he was trying to obtain some different perspective. 

You remember the sounds of nighttime, walking down a street. He told you that you looked pretty and it was the first time you remember thinking you’d do anything for him, like hold the tip of a dagger to your chest, over your heart. Or maybe at the bottom of your sternum if he wanted to make you hurt, right below where the bone ends, whispering to yourself to _do it._ Anything at all just as long as he asked, determined to inhale his second hand smoke even if it ended up killing you. 

The love you harbor for him will always be the rock you are battered against. 

You step onto the jet behind Tata and her kids - hovering somewhere among the bounds of their little family unit, not quite on the inside, not quite outside it, either. Pablo is in front of them discussing something with the pilot, his lawyer and friends already seated, playing music you can dimly hear from over the roar of the jet. It doesn’t really matter what they’re discussing, or what’s playing, because you aren’t really listening, but it - all of this, this hustling to escape, corralled like livestock on a set of white stairs leading to a life you don’t even want - flanked by Gustavo and his scorching presence against your back, it’s making you feel oddly like you don’t exist - a nonpresence, or maybe just some place holder. He could take away your name now, if he wanted, strip you of it like this life has stripped everything else, and nothing would be different. 

What you want, what you desperately crave instead, is a soft, carefully cultivated and gentle place to live in; a snow globe of fuzzy and distilled and blurry details that you don’t have to worry about focusing on, and to be left alone there - allowing peace and quiet to be the backdrop to your breaking heart. Instead of this, this constant chaos, this weird tepid and tense sort of in-between where danger is always a possibility but somehow never something concrete. You seem to escape it, or at least remain on the fringes long enough for it to feel like a distant threat, but it’s there and close enough that you can never calm down. 

Gustavo guides you down the aisle. It’s pristine, brown manila colored seats flanking you on either side, the air hostess further up the aisle, looking amiable and stock still. You recognize her. She’s always on your flights, part of Pablo’s payroll - background checked, came back clean because it’s important not to leave loose ends like that - _no need to raise unwarranted suspicion_ \- and given clearances; paid an astronomical amount of money to stay quiet and polite. Her name is Selena. Tall and pretty with a blue ascot tied around her neck that matches the curtain separating the cockpit from the rest of the jet. She gives you a smile and for the first time since waking up you feel somewhat seen. 

Then Gustavo places his palm on the back of your neck, squeezes the muscle lightly as he kisses the top of your head. 

“Here, niñita.” 

The leather feels cool when you sit down, chilled by the air conditioning pumped through the cabin. You can hear the music more clearly, some uptempo repetitive song you’re only half listening to - the radio playing it somewhere out of view. Gustavo watches you sit, leans down to kiss your forehead, but he doesn’t sit down next to you, and you didn’t really expect him to - he’s got work to do, needs room to place documents and other shit needing going over while he’s got the chance to focus on them, so really you aren’t hurt by it. It stings, though, just a little - just in the way that has you angry at yourself. 

So instead of focusing on him, on his forearm as he scribbles into documents and the inky black snake that stretches from his elbow to the back of his palm, on the knife that its mouth leads into stretching vertically along his middle finger, you stare out the window and watch the jet take off. 

“Would you like some?” A voice, accompanied by a shiny pack of peppermint gum suddenly in your periphery, is your only warning to the intrusion of thoughts, and when you turn to look you see that the person holding it is Tata. Her newborn in her other arm, swaddled in a white blanket, held against her chest. She’s smiling, warm and inviting, but she looks tired, too. Worn out. Run down. A mirror reflecting your own face back at you. 

“For your ears.” She goes on when you simply look at her. 

“Thank you, Tata.” You smile back, hollow, and take a piece from her, worrying the edges of the wrapper in your fingers. 

Tata sits down, adjusts her little girl and looks over at you, studying your face for seconds that feel like a very long time, her expression growing serious, distressed. 

“You don’t look happy.” 

You look down at your hands, at your cuticles picked clean, at your hangnails scabbing over, and sigh. “I don’t like what might happen.” 

“What do you mean?” 

A dangerous question, one that you’re having trouble answering, but the urge to be careful around her usurps your desire to be honest, aware that anything you say could become ammunition, could become a reason. _Never say this to Pablo. Or Tata. Do you understand?_

“I mean that we’re going back to a country that doesn’t want us.” You unwrap the gum, chew it to give yourself something else to focus on instead of the thoughts threatening to make themselves known and poison your mouth. 

“Pablo is doing his best.” 

“I know.” 

She really believes it, that she’s telling the truth, which makes having this discussion worse. Her devotion is admirable, is on par with your own, but you can’t understand how she hasn’t cracked yet, how she’s surviving under the pressure. How she can have his kids, know that he’s been cheating on her, and still smile at him like he’s got strings attached to the moon, to the stars, pulling them and hanging it in her honor every night. 

Doesn’t seem to mind the way you all had been forced to leave as soon as possible before the Colombian government doesn’t let you enter the country for killing the next fucking president. 

“But this feels like a fight we cannot win, Tata…and I’m scared. For you, for your kids, for Gustavo…” 

“Pablo will fix it-” 

“That’s not what I’m trying to say-” 

“We are nobody outside of Colombia. He’s doing what’s necessary to protect us-” 

“By killing more politicians?” 

“It’s more complicated than that. You should be grateful-” 

_“But aren’t you afraid?”_

She goes silent, her expression cloaked, and it’s almost like maybe she wants to say something, wants to agree, but also like she can’t bring herself to do it; to admit that she’s terrified just like you are. The struggle is in her face, in the way her eyes fix on the seat in front of her, on the way her mouth pulls into a tight line. You want to tell her that it’s okay, that she can say it, because you need someone who understands, even if she had been the one to convince Pablo to go back. You’re sick of your silence, nauseous with the way that it isn’t just silence but this loud, terrifying voice that had been mute, with its vocal cords severed and words caught on the back of its tongue. 

“I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.” She says finally, quiet and hoarse with emotion. “Are you?” 

Tata gets up, moves to sit with her son just as Pablo passes. They smile at each other, and he kisses her, then offers her one of the drinks in his hand. She takes it, thanks him for it in a voice honey-sweet, then suddenly he’s offering one to you - and you’re looking at him and seeing someone different - no longer the cherishing husband, the adoring father, but the mask of someone who’s pretending to care. Camouflaged doubt. Suspicion. A sort of blankness behind his eyes that creeps with something sinister. 

“Here.” He offers you a large margarita glass lined with chunky salt, a lime slice pierced on the rim. It’s slippery with condensation, filled almost all the way with alcohol. “Cheer up. We’re going home!” 

You glance past Pablo for Gustavo, your eyes landing on his back and his broad shoulders. He isn’t looking, isn’t paying attention, so you’re entirely alone for this interaction, defenseless. 

“I shouldn’t. Tata just gave me gum.” You gesture to your mouth, tempted to take the glass purely to appease him, to get him away from your space, but also hesitant - afraid that if you do it’ll set you into some weird motion with him - as if you’d be indebted to something you can’t handle. 

“Take it.” He encourages. “You need to relax.” 

So you do. You’re learning quickly that to survive around him you need to adapt. You can’t let him see you the way Gustavo does, so you swallow down the sour fear climbing up your throat and conform yourself to these circumstances the same way a tree learns to swallow barbed wire.

Pleased, Pablo makes his way back up the aisle, finds his seat, starts a conversation with his cousin about business and you tune out again a little less voluntarily; a sort of dull ringing in your ears. 

And you look at Gustavo and your eyes are glued on him, on your life and the stupid fucking cocktail in your hand and they are full of sharp and achingly painful tears. Ones that make you begin to ridicule him in your mind, make you a little ashamed of yourself, hoping that by associating him with all of his negative qualities and by ignoring the good, you’d be able to overcome the stupid feelings that blind them to you now. Hoping they’d somehow set you free. Turn him into the villain you know he’s capable of being. 

Your mom taught you a lesson years ago that sometimes you have to meet people in the middle, some sort of bullshit advice about compromise, about finding common ground. She had fallen in love once, had gotten a taste of the cruelty of what love can be, so she had taught you to reach out, but she had also said that sometimes you have to leave them where they stand. Let the person choose whether they want to take the steps needed to get to you or not. It’s too bad you hadn’t remembered that in time. Too bad it doesn’t matter because you’d walk and you’d walk and you’d walk to get to him even if it felt like every step taken added a dozen more, right up to those pair of gates that promise Eden only to be told that they’re closed forever, and that all you’re walking had been for nothing. 

There was no convincing this morning. There was no asking. You had gone to him, just like you always do, and just like you always will. You consider what you would have done if he hadn’t called out to you - if you would have laid in bed, hoping to slip between the springs - or if you would have made it over to the shower eventually, maybe after he was done, maybe not, to run yourself a bath. 

You would have sat in the water until it got cold, until your skin was puckering - delicate the way fingertips get - resisting the temptation to submerge yourself entirely beneath it and scream, then you’d have maybe taken a deep breath. 

Gustavo slips away from Pablo, scrubs his hand over his face and fixes his hair underneath his hat, finds his place beside you. 

“You need to look happier, niñita.” He whispers, voice low and hushed and careful as he glances over his shoulder, down the line of the jet, watching for ears that might be listening. 

You purposefully keep yourself from looking at him, head turned and gaze settled on some fixed point in the leather armrest your fingernails scrape and pick at, pieces of it curling up. You’re aware of him looking anyway, of the way he’s staring at your profile, how he can probably see the way you’re fighting with yourself not to fucking cry again. 

“Why? I’m not happy. And I won’t pretend to be just to keep from hurting your cousin’s feelings.” 

“That’s exactly what I’m worried about. This isn’t about you-” 

“Trust me, I know that-” 

“-You need to understand we have a better chance at influencing him in Colombia.” 

“I understand that. I also understand he’s only comfortable at war!” You hiss. “You know what he did wasn’t necessary, and now we’ve got even bigger problems. He’s leading us to slaughter, Gustavo.” You take a long sip of your drink, stopping only once Gustavo wiggles the glass out from between your fingers, flags down the flight attendant and hands it to her with a tense smile. 

“ _Enough._ You’ve got to stop. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you can’t let him hear you speaking like that.” 

“What’s he going to do, Gustavo? Kill me?” You scoff, then laugh, bitter and acidic and so, so tired. “No, he doesn’t do that. He’ll just have someone else do it for him.” 

Gustavo straightens in his seat, tenses as if you’d slapped him, and looks pointedly away from you, out the airplane window, trying to control his temper. 

You bask in it, grin wide and pleased and laugh again, bordering a sort of hysterical giggling that should be concerning, growing serious in your anger when he meets your gaze, his own shifting into one of concerned frustration, sure that you speak slowly, careful to enunciate every syllable. 

“Maybe he’ll ask you to do it and teach us both a lesson.” 

You get up, fight your way past him, over his knees, pushing at the hands the reach to grab you, reach to keep you in your place; hands that fall away easily because he doesn’t want to make a scene, doesn’t want to catch the attention of Pablo, of any of them, so the struggle isn’t long or intense or anything at all, but it’s enough to have you shaking with adrenaline anyway, knowing that half of what you say doesn’t matter - that maybe what you’ve just said finds itself in that category - knowing the other half is just in a pitiful, stupid attempt at grasping for him. 

“Can I get you anythin-” Selena. Smiling sparkling white and professional. Harboring the kind of self control and contentment Gustavo must wish you’d have. 

“Just don’t let him in here.” You cut her off, quickly slipping away. 

The bathroom is cramped, colder than the cabin, different shades of blinding white with stainless steel accents. The counter. The back splash. All metal including the sink. It’s small, almost useless, nothing more than a small bowl with a faucet attached, and you lean against it, close your eyes, feel as if you’re somewhere else. It’s muted in here, the same way it is at the bottom of a swimming pool, your senses dulled, and you can no longer hear the music. 

You’re catching yourself having moments like these more often - moments in which you’re suffering - quietly or otherwise, angry at yourself that even still, all you want to do is rest your head in his lap and close your eyes. Moments that should be indicative of something more awful, more concerning, moments in which your clarity is so insufferably coherent you can’t stand it. You can’t stand that you know what you’re doing, that you’re not entirely innocent in this anymore, that love has brought you here and has tortured you like this. 

So you squeeze your eyelids shut until you can hear the roaring of your blood, until white shapes dance along the canvas of your closed eyelids, knowing that you won’t be alone for much longer, that you’ve got to let it all out right now if you want to keep from breaking your own heart. 

Selena is talking, saying something about flight protocol, about safety measures, about how she can’t allow him to go in there, but the male voice that follows doesn’t hold the aggravation you predicted you’d find in it. It is careful in its cadence as he says something to her in a hushed tone, something that must make her change her mind, must remind her who she works for because the door opens and you’re moving without thinking to make room for him. 

“You keep running away from me like it will solve your problems.” 

“No” You correct. “Running away would be too easy.” 

You understand that now. 

You face Gustavo, pressed against the lip of the counter’s edge, hands gripping the hard surface tightly. 

“It’s not my problems I’m worried about…I’m scared for you, Gustavo. This isn’t our war.” 

“Our war…” He snorts, and he takes a breath to continue, but you cut him off, unable to handle being pinned underneath the weight of his patronizing descant again. 

“Please don’t do that to me. Please.” You’re tired. So tired. Exhausted of existing three degrees from his heart, far enough away for him to be cruel but close enough to beg your forgiveness. 

“I just want to love you, Gustavo, but you’re making it so hard for me.” 

I have so much of you in my heart, you want to say. 

So much that you are leaking out, dripping down the spaces between my ribs. 

But what are you to him other than a person who warms his bed at night? Someone to change the rhythm of his days? Something expendable, something he can ache over like people must feel for a weak thing, to discard once the feeling goes away? 

You don’t know and he hasn’t ever said. 

But it would be unfair to him and yourself if you believed that that’s all this is. He also rebuilds you. He isn’t entirely callus or selfish. Deliberately. Piece by piece. He takes what he won’t allow himself to give back but he at least repairs a little with each kiss; with the way he makes sure you’re taken care of; with the way he sneaks away with you, takes you dancing; with the way he worries without worrying, the kind of quiet stress he refuses to acknowledge. There, always, settled like a stone in the back of his head. Thinking about you during the day, wondering if you’re safe. If the dumbasses left in charge of your security are as well trained as Pablo seems to think they are. And his hand will drift to his phone more than once, taking on a mind of its own, daring him to dial your number. Especially on days when there’s nothing but the endless din of circular arguments. When the last thing he wants to do is sit at a table full of men he dislikes trying to negotiate when Pablo refuses to have his ego put into question. When he’s forced to be the mediator. When really all he’d rather be doing is laying in bed with you. 

So you’re kind of aware, in a vague and confusing way, the place you hold in his hierarchy. You’re just not sure you’re at the very top. 

“How can I make it easier?” 

It takes you by surprise, his question. There’s a hard edge to his voice. A solidness that makes the fearful part of you worry he’s asking in a way that’s mocking your pain. You know he isn’t, that it’s more like he’s made his mind up about something. Still, you look at him with immense and heartbreaking longing, feeling like he had reached into your chest, found your soul, and ripped it out with as much force as he could; catching bones on his way out, snapping them as easily as branches in winter. All because he could. All because you let him. 

“I don’t know…” 

He exhales, looks down at his feet, to the side as he licks his lips, then back at you. 

“Yes, you do.” 

You do. You know and that’s worse than not knowing. 

He’ll never be able to give you what you want. 

_I want to scratch your arm and see my blood, you think. I want to be as unnoticeable and necessary as the air you walk around in, as the air you breathe. I want to be in the same room as you and not have to search fervishfully for the love that I am giving you freely. I want a love I cannot have, but that’s okay because all I want is you._

_I want you, Gustavo. Just you._

_That would make it easier._

Gustavo reaches for you, then pulls you against his body by the back of your neck. You follow easily without restraint, dissolving into his embrace. His nose brushes against your own and your mouth opens like you’re about to something but nothing comes out - choking on the gravity of your feelings for him. His hand goes further into your hair, pressing into the delicate hollow where the base of your skull meets your spine and he uses his hold as leverage to tilt your head just enough to brush his lips against yours; testing, waiting, and when you don’t pull away he kisses you fully - again and again until you’re pliable beneath his fingers and liable to break. 

And you tangle your fingers in his hair and your tongue sweeps through his mouth with an undercurrent of aggression he isn’t surprised to find because you’re _pissed_ and you’ve got every right to be, so he’ll let you take it out on him like he did in the shower - let you grope and grab and pull until you get it all out - until you no longer shake with fury when you touch him. 

The kiss shouldn’t feel as good as it does; he tastes like cigarette smoke, his lips and teeth and mouth aggressive in their pursuit of you. You’re distraught; snotty and able to taste your own tears. He’s annoyed, running on next to nothing because the sleep you had managed to get last night was the empty kind, the kind that makes you wake up feeling more exhausted, but so are you and even though everything is a fucking mess right now, fucking him is the closest you’re getting to feeling okay. So you let him kiss you, touch and caress and sigh because he’s starved for it and because you need it too. Something physical to distract from the intangible. You can get lost in him and worry about the rest later. Put off the inevitable for just a little while to save your sanity.

Ignoring the way your body aches when you look at him - cracking and fracturing like straining glass. The way your lungs fold, collapsing. The way your grief crawls like an animal alive beneath your skin - starting at your stomach, scratching and clawing its way up your throat until you’re bursting with it - coming out with a heavy sob when you’re alone in bathrooms like this one, staring at yourself in mirrors, wondering _what the fuck_ you’re doing being with someone like him as you scrub your hands and face over and over again in the sink until the water is too hot or too cold or until your face feels as if its been peeled because no matter how much soap you use you can never clean yourself of him.

Can never wipe away the ghost of his lips - a little chapped from cigarettes, scratchy because of his fucking mustache, filled with every word he doesn’t allow himself to say.

You ignore the feel of his hands - heavy objects, solid and grasping, groping and tender - always touching you so carefully despite the way they leave burns, would be indentations of his fingerprints. And afterwards you look expecting to see skin that’s raw, skin that hurts and stings. Yet you see nothing. A bruise maybe, pooled deep beneath the dermis like droplets of ink in hues of purple and blue or of healing green and yellow - but nothing else. No brand. No scars. Nothing. 

It’s only ever the pressure that follows you.

It’s only ever the guilt. 

“Gustavo.” You say his name and he hushes you, cups your face with his hands. You love him so much in this moment that it hurts, makes you feel too fragile and weak especially as the weight and presence of him rushes into your head like the ocean at high tide. You’re swept up, buried by a wave of helpless, frantic and sort of poignant need to feel him and feel this. 

This kind of closeness and intimacy you’ve spent so fucking long wanting.

He must know he has to be careful with you, most know he has to be gentle or else he’s going to break you completely and the realization of his purposeful tenderness makes your throat constrict. 

So you kiss him harder because it’s easier than crying, it’s easier than words and worrying about being quiet, and he makes a muffled, sort of surprised sound as he backs you further into the cubicle, the steel cool and solid through your t-shirt. 

You don’t really process how your fingers move automatically to his belt, fumbling with it, the buckle clinking as you work it apart just enough to get to where you’re really after - your hands making quick work with the button of his pants. And he’s moving his free hand down between your legs, flattening the curve of his palm over your underwear, under your shorts, and leaning away to pepper kisses careening down the column of your neck, looking at you like you think he’s supposed to, like maybe he always has, the same way you probably look at him. 

You grind against him with a needy sigh, braced on his forearms, nails digging into the tanned skin and muscle like he’s the only thing anchoring you to this earth. And he knows without you telling him, the sudden thrum of awareness that shocks through your body, a bright live wire thing that makes it feel like at any moment you might lose yourself completely, so he nudges your panties to the side, works a finger inside of you and curls it, his thumb finding the bundle of nerves just above the entrance of your cunt - then adds another until you’re panting against his jaw, his presence warm and raw and honest, all consuming in a way that has you realizing you’ll forgive him for this too, way before he asks for it. 

Cell by cell you slip away, then resurrect. And you tell him that you love him, wishing the words would somehow help fix everything, that when this was over things would be okay, that it’s fine now because he’s letting you focus on him - letting you touch and feel - get lost the only way you know how. _You’re fine_ , in a way you can’t understand, in a way that makes everything seem small and insignificant in comparison to what you harbor in your heart for him.

“Lift your hips.” You do, whine when suddenly his hands are falling away from you, muted when you see that he’s reaching to tug down your shorts. 

Gustavo pulls himself out of his pants, pushes into you with one long thrust, rests his forehead against your own and watches the way it sinks into you, spreading you open; warm and wet and tight as your muscles clench around the width of it, of _him._

Your entire body shakes with the pressure of being alive. The urge to make him feel - to make him beg and weep and scream just the same as you do inside your head almost every day - is ravenous and overcoming. You want to read the same pain in his face that is reflected back at you in the mirror; the same kind of frenzied love etched into every feature, every expression and as you blink, slapping his hand away and brushing your clit with your fingers yourself, you catch glimpses of it. Catch the way his jaw clicks, the way his eyes squeeze shut as you tighten around him. Then feel the way his hands fight to keep his grip soft despite the desire to have you like he always has, searing and as hot as coals. 

_This is what he gets…for making me love him, your mind filters. This is what he gets._

“I want to be loved by you, Gustavo.” You gasp, fingers digging into his forearms, into the pink scar-tissue of his right arm, an accident as a kid, he had said, _I fell off my bike._ “That’s what would make it easier.” 

“You think that I don’t?” He grunts, finding a pace that is tortuous and too much and everything you need simultaneously. 

“It doesn’t feel like you do.” 

“You want me to say it, niñita?” 

You frown, turn your head away even though it doesn’t do anything. You can still feel his hot breath against your cheek, his lips as he grazes the skin above it when he speaks. 

“I want you to mean it.” 

It isn’t enough, what he’s doing. You’ll take what you can get, sacrifice parts of yourself to devour what you’re given, but you’re running out of pieces to offer. And although he gives and mends and rebuilds, it’s only ever the parts you need to function, the parts you require to stay in his life. You need more. 

You can’t stand being so fucking lonely. 

“I love you.” He murmurs, words like catching broken sentences between radio static. _“I love you.”_ He repeats, his snapping forward, emphasizing his words with every deliberate drag of his cock, pushing you further up and against the warming metal beneath you. And you nod because it’s the only thing you trust yourself to do, flushed and feeling like your cells are fizzling. 

Your eyes flicker over him - at the muscles tensing beneath his shirt, the sweat darkening his collar, at his lips, red and raw and plump from kissing you, his shoulders broad and his arms are sturdy and glistening and his eyes when you finally meet his gaze are blown with affection and desire and love. 

He loves you. More than you have ever known. More than you’d be able to understand. 

Gustavo shifts his angle, lifts your left leg up and over his hip, and for half a second, your world spins; your head filled with static. He’s got a hold on you that has the potential to crush you. . Maybe it’s foolish to base your existence in him, but you don’t really care. You’d rather be a shell of yourself with him than be lost without him.. 

When you come you come _ **hard;**_ unexpectedly, your breath catching and dissolving into nothing. White dances in the space Gustavo doesn’t occupy in front of you. Toes curling, unable to articulate how he’s making you feeling. He doesn’t stop moving, fucks you through it because he knows you can take it, knows you need it, muttering a quick and sharp _“fuck,”_ never taking his eyes off you. 

He leans against you, lips against your hairline in a way that isn’t really a kiss but close enough to one that has you absorbing the affection like a plant after rain. You close your eyes, let yourself sink into the feeling. 

“Will you forgive me, chiquita?” 

You look at him and see all of your life in front of you. 

All of what’s left of it. 

“Always.”


	5. as close as you can get for as long as it lasts

The jet lands sometime in the late afternoon, right before the high daylight sun turns into an evening warmth - when it’s still hot and shining and reflecting off sheet-metal roofs - but slowly lowering in the sky, lazily and bright, taking its time as it falls behind the mountains, casting long and beautiful shadows, lingering the way sunlight does even after the sun has set. 

The runway is nearly an exact copy of the one you had left behind. Bright black with blinding white, parallel lines running up and down for as far as you can see. The light softened to a simmer in the engine’s exhales. Beetle green and dark blue Ford Explorers are parked a few feet away from the landing strip, lined up after another and idling. Inside are men you know and men you don’t, different this time because they aren’t the boys of eighteen or nineteen (alarming how close they are in age to you), but older - trusted and veteran groups of bodyguards and sicarios that made it past Pablo’s expendable phase. Closer to Gustavo’s age. Meaner. But they leave you alone because they know better. Stare. Watch. But never touch. Never press against the boundaries. 

You know how they act, though. Hear their language. Whispered in tongues like snakes. They lack the polish even someone like Pablo has, in it for the pussy and money. Another reason you feel so much like you’re on the goddamn outside of things. Your fear sets you apart. Tata doesn’t seem bothered by them, neither does Herimelda. They’re protected, though, aren’t they? Off limits. The same could be said for you, except you don’t know to what degree their set of rules extends to - maids, yes, yet not the wife, definitely not the wife - but the girlfriend…the girlfriend is shy, and scared, so maybe. You avoid them, doing your best to act like they aren’t there, and so the extent of your trust in them only extends to Poison. 

Pablo’s lap dog. Head sicario and personal hitman. Cat killer. 

_Babysitter._

The man stuck keeping an eye on you during negotiations, deals, fucking luncheons and dinners that you aren’t meant to be a part of; when Gustavo can’t look after you himself, but can’t be fucked to leave you at home, either. 

He approaches as you step off the last stair descending from the jet and onto the tarmac, greets Gustavo, offers to take your carry-on bag. 

“Welcome back to Colombia, parcera.” 

You look into his face, into the dark aviators that cover his eyes, and you sense more than you consciously realize that he knows this isn’t good for you. It’s all about saving face, though. Keeping up appearances. Bedrooms. Beaches. Airplane bathrooms. All appropriate places to let the faucet trickle. Never in broad daylight. Never on the tarmac. Certainly never in front of Pablo. 

“Thank you, Poison.” 

“How many times have I asked you to call me Roberto, patrona?” Poison glances at you from over his shoulder, grinning. Dressed in an off-white shirt and a black leather jacket, his gold chain sparkles against his chest. You half expect that one of these days, right now for instance, that when he smiles at you, a row of razor sharp teeth will have replaced the soft roundness of the others. 

“I’m not your boss.” 

Poison chuckles, looks away. “No, you’re nicer than those sons of bitches.” 

He escorts you to one of the vehicles in the middle, starts making small talk with Pablo and Gustavo about the flight, wheels lined up like a presidential procession, everyone armed to the teeth. All these gross displays of wealth and power, you’d almost think to see the Colombian flag waving from an antenna attached to the hood, yellow, blue and red waving around wildly with the breeze. When you glance, however, there isn’t anything there. You’ve never gotten used to it, to being around shit like this. The armed men, the way they talk. The feeling doesn’t go away even as you keep your head down, this twisting anxiety that you’re just on the cusp of something really, terribly awful. It hadn’t gone away when Gustavo was fucking you, didn’t go away after, hasn’t gone away now. 

Poison opens the door, offers a quick smile when you glance at him uneasily. 

“What we need to do now is…” Pablo is talking just outside the car as you get in, the smell of leather seats and the way the world filters as you step in tripping you back into reality. The door shuts with a click, his voice muffles. “…to deliver a message to that fucking fag. I need to know which side he is on.” 

You look out the window, through the tinted glass and see the three of them standing in a semi-circle talking to one another. Behind them, luggage is being thrown into trunks. Tata is smiling, her kids are being helped into the car in front of you, Hermilda behind them. You look away, glance towards the rear view mirror just as the driver turns on the a.c., then the radio. They’re just mouths moving now, gesturing, posturing. Pablo says something through a drag of his cigarette, his chest tight as he holds in an inhale and speaks at the same time. Gustavo shakes his head, brings his hand to his eyebrow and scratches. Galán’s funeral had come and gone, but it’s never as easy as it should be, is it? Cut off the head and two more grow back. César Gaviria’s reluctant ascension from speechwriter to presidential candidate had taken nearly all of Colombia by surprise. It’s no wonder Pablo is already all over him, trying to assess the kind of damage he needs to do to get his point across. You know logically that it’s important you know which side the politician is on too, since his stance on extradition will no doubt affect you as well, but right now - in this moment, alone in the backseat of a car - all you can think to be is devastated. Crushed because your heart is taking you in a direction that you can’t follow. 

You would have been content to stay in Panama City. 

Just as long as he was there, too. 

But you’re here now, again, so when Gustavo looks in your direction, you look away quickly. Down at your lap, then at the vents situated between the two front seats. Finding yourself pushing them open and pointing them towards you and closing your eyes, willing this all to be over. 

The drive passes startlingly fast, your mind unable to pick up on the details. 

By the time you get to your new home in [Medellín](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMedell%25C3%25ADn&t=Yzk4NTRhMGFlMzkwOTk3N2JkOGU4MzA5ZDU0YzgzZWJkMzI5ZDc0OSwyOTcyYmU4MWJhYjBlZWJmYWMxMTFlNTEwZjEzNDY4YTEwN2UzZjlj&ts=1597977355), the sun has set completely and the property is shadowed by the night. The houses are beautiful, placed on massive pieces of land that look out into the mountains. There are lamp posts, two lights to each pole, situated within a few feet of one another, casting the pathway leading to the front entrance and the backyard in an artificial glow close to moonlight. Illuminating metal chairs and tables, a soccer field. Everywhere there are plants, tucked away in hallway corners, resting on shelves. Decorating or emphasizing expensive furniture, paintings. 

Already, it has the eclectic feel of having been lived in. Bringing warmth, surprisingly, but that must be because of the colors. Deep and vibrant oranges and reds and browns. Accented by off-whites and greens. Beautiful colors. Adobe style with intricate ceramic tiles bordering walls, acting as the back splash to bathroom and kitchen sinks. 

You lag as Pablo’s men brush past you, carrying luggage and other items, creating a soft wind with every step. It had rained, the backyard veiled in a fog that sometimes appears after a heavy thunderstorm, the warm, grey clouds mixing with the air as it cooled, the ground still hot from the sun. Everything outside has been dipped in a pale blue light, droplets still dripping from the trees’ leaves, birds singing among the symphony of crickets. 

Gustavo’s hand is a half-presence at your lower back, then a full one. 

“Are you tired?” His voice is low, nearly gentle. 

You turn to look at him, realize you’re alone on your path, and that as you were taking everything in, everyone else had gone inside. 

“No.” You answer, leaning into him despite yourself, and despite the way you hate this place already. “Are you?” 

“No.” Gustavo shakes his head, reaching for the cigarette pack tucked into the pocket of his shirt. He taps them against his shoulder, packing the tobacco, before he fishes one out, the half-second, quick flicker of the lighter and its orange/red cast on the grass poking a hole in the stillness between your bodies.

You walk for a little while longer in silence, pass the garages, no doubt already filled to capacity with drugs - bricks of cocaine wrapped in plastic and sealed with light brown tape - lining the walls all the way up to the dark oak ceilings. 

“Are you going to murder that man?” You pierce the quiet with your question, the suddenness and seriousness of it making Gustavo glance at you, frowning. 

“What man are you talking about, niñita?” 

You stop walking, look at him like you can’t believe he’d actually play that stupid. 

“The one that’s running for president. The one who might support extradition. Are you going to kill him?” 

Gustavo exhales, removes himself from you and you hate that you miss his warmth already, miss the press of his side against yours even though you knew that he’d do that by asking, by opening your mouth, making him aware you know of the atrocities that go on around you by saying them out loud. He disagreed with Galán’s killing. Didn’t like that it happened. But not for any moral reasons, not because murder is wrong. 

He flicks his cigarette, the ashes floating to the ground. “No.The situation with Galán right now is hardly under control. Killing another politician so soon would be messy. And expensive. So no, not right now.” 

You nod like you understand, and you do, the logical parts of it at least - the self interest parts, the political ramifications, the message it would send - but not everything else. 

“But you would…if it came to that. You would kill him.” 

He looks at you from down the bridge of his nose, white smoke obscuring different parts of his face for half-seconds until the wind carries it somewhere else. You wait for his answer like the earth waits for the storm clouds to give way, how lungs wait for the next inhale. Suspended. Tense. 

“Yes, nena.” 

You nod again, slowly this time, then start to walk.

“How do you deal with it, Gustavo? With the guilt?” 

You know that he’s still behind you, that he follows, because of his footsteps. Because he can’t just let a conversation like this go, can’t just let these ideas fester in your head (as theoretically harmless as they may be while they remain thoughts and private conversations) without knowing he had kept you from saying something you’d both regret, and that maybe he’d eased your mind a bit. 

What you don’t know is if he feels any guilt at all. 

“I’m not the one getting my hands dirty. You know that.” Gustavo answers easily, bud between his lips, muffling his voice slightly, as if that explains it all, somehow (by only giving the orders) he gets to keep his soul and hands clean. 

“You’re not the one pulling the trigger, but you’re the brains behind it, right? The one who helps Pablo decide. Who gives him ideas? So how do you deal with it? Because I can’t. I’m trying, but I can’t seem to forgive myself. It’s hard, Gustavo. Being with you is so fucking hard. And coming back here - to Colombia - pretending that everything’s fine because we’re home, only being listened to when you’re fucking me, shutting me up because you don’t know what to say, is-“ 

God, you don’t know what it is - just that it’s tearing little pieces of you apart - making you wonder if you could ever be the way you were - because to the starving every crumb becomes a meal, every empty room and unfulfilling conversation becomes a mouth. You’d pick any plate he offers you clean, press your fingers against every morsel, desperate for even a grain of something to relieve that crawling itch inside you that screams it wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

Life shouldn’t be able to do that. To make things so fucking hard. _He_ shouldn’t be able to do that. And yet. 

A brief pause like maybe you had lost your nerve or changed your mind - deciding suddenly it wasn’t even worth talking anymore because what good has it done you in the past. It wouldn’t be the first time and you don’t think it’ll be the last in which things get left unsaid - swallowed by swollen tongues and clenched teeth and fearful mouths. Always so close to saying something. Always sort of saying something, but never quite the whole truth, thoughts filtered to become softer, easier to digest. Less harmful if they only contain half of what you mean. 

A hitch in your breath and it’s like Gustavo can hear the way your molars gnash against one another. You do that when you’re stressed, he’s noticed - sometimes in your sleep, too - unaware that he’s awake, plagued by the same goddamn things you are, leaving you thinking now that the decisions he has to make come easy to him, like he isn’t aware the kind of effect its having on you - his company like some sort of drawn out poison.. 

“Is what?” 

He stands in front of you, stops you from going any further, cigarette collecting ash, bracelet catching against the light. 

“Is what, nena?” He repeats himself, close enough to you that your eyes line up with his chest, making it infinitely more intimidating having to look up at him, having to speak your mind in such a vulnerable position. 

“It’s nothing. It doesn’t matter.” 

“It matters if you’re saying it.” He supplants, fiddling with the necklace around your throat. A Christmas gift from Pablo’s mother. A small, golden thing more expensive than your entire life. He runs his thumb along it then lets it drop, flicks his cigarette into the yard, the bud like a red hot lightning bug against the dark grass. 

His touch conceals all kinds of violence - eases the burden, makes you purposefully never mention how the absence of it (that lack of it, his touch), makes the violence heavier and harder to deal with. And although you may be soft in his palm, compliant and malleable, the second he stops touching you is the moment your anger and grief comes roaring back. 

But all you want to do is to join it, the cigarette, lying in the soft brown earth, feeling it breathe, letting the dirt swallow you up. 

You set your jaw. 

“It’s humiliating.” You say, the callow soreness of the emotion in your voice so choked and strangled that it’s like he had reached into your throat and pulled it out himself - holding it broken in his fist. Yet you continue to be the misery that apparently wasn’t enough for you. You stay with him regardless, love him regardless, even though it’s starting to feel like loving someone else is just something people endure. You want comfort, love, but most of the time you have no idea where it is. 

And maybe sometimes you have it. Or maybe just something close enough to be called by the same name. 

Love. 

Love that had to be fought for - ripped in outbursts of violent anger that burn white hot somewhere just above your sternum. Love that is pulled gently from his hands - falling easily when he’s trying to convince you to pack your bags - when all you want to do is lay with him for a little while. 

You had asked, when you were younger, long before coming to Colombia, long before meeting him, for proof of God - of love, of good things, of things that would make you happy, make you feel alive - some sort of mid youth crisis prompted by college and debt and leaving home and he was what you got. 

The man that has become the heartbeat of your night and days. 

The same man that might end it all for you. 

The worst thing about it all being that you can’t make sense of it because you’ve put so much of yourself inside him that there’s very little of you left inside yourself. And it doesn’t get better, it just gets older, not any easier to deal with, but faint - only to be renewed like the ripping off of a scab - in moments like this one where you’re not sure what’s happening just that it’s not good, that another public figure might die along with innocent people, and that you might be just as guilty for it, too. 

“It’s humiliating…” He repeats, but there isn’t any venom in his voice, he doesn’t make you feel like what you’ve said was dirty or wrong or like you shouldn’t have said it at all. Neutral, almost, but not quite. “You’re giving me whiplash, nena. What is it exactly that you want? What were you expecting?” 

Not this. God, never this. 

It’s your fault for romanticizing it. 

For convincing yourself that if you got entangled with him, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s so easy to rationalize and daydream of a world you’ve never lived in, looking only at the money and all that it has to offer. Looking at him, how he makes you feel. So easy to forget, still on the outside of it all, how that wealth was obtained. 

So yeah, it’s humiliating. 

“This business makes us a lot of money, niñita. I never lied to you about why. Thing is, I can’t seem to understand what’s been going on with you lately. You had no problem with any of this until we left for Panama.” 

Your ears ring with static, the fuzziness traveling down your jaw, filling your teeth. 

“You mean right after we had to flee the country because the DEA was breathing down Pablo‘s neck?” You hiss, then continue with more venom. “Right after we had to leave all our things - our clothing, our belongings - while you burned documents in a trashcan by the pool because two hours away was a caravan full of men armed and ready to kill us? You mean then?” 

Gustavo looks away from you, rubs his face with his hand, brushing the corners of his mouth in a movement as he exhales a noise you know means he’s frustrated with your assessment. 

But it also means that he knows you’re right, that he’s close to conceding. 

“Things are under control now. I’m keeping an eye on Pablo. What happened won’t happen again.” 

“Won’t it?” You contradict, feeling about as thin and transparent as spun sugar. “I’m not stupid, Gustavo, or unaware.” 

You sidestep him, walk onto the lawn knowing he’ll follow, the condensation on the grass getting your feet wet through your sandals. The earth is cool, though, grounding. “Getting rid of extradition is everything to him. He’d sacrifice all of us, Gustavo. Even you.” 

“Goddamnit. Okay, okay. Niñita, okay.” He huffs, his impatience - not with you, not entirely at least, but at this situation and this conversation you two seem to be always having - so familiar that it’s nearly comforting. “What would you have me do?” 

He asks it gently, so gently that you think he’s making fun of you, that he’s mocking your fear, but when you turn around to look at him you see the sincerity in his face, knowing then that he’s genuinely asking. 

“Don’t let him get you killed. I won’t survive it.” 

He has bisected your heart and gutted each half, scooped it clean with his hands - his crime still crimson underneath his fingernails, the moon floating through you now - feeling tender and ghostlike. 

Gustavo looks away from you, at some point over your shoulder, then again just above your head. He looks tired, the kind of tired that doesn’t come from just losing sleep, and it makes your heart hurt to see him like this. 

Then he nods, lifts his hand and reaches for you, and like on the beach you let him pull you towards him, let him bring you into his warmth that seems to always be the answer to everything. 

He will always be the answer. 

“I’m not ready to die yet, nena.” Gustavo brings his hand to your cheek, brushes his thumb along your bottom lip, then pets your hair, following the movement by leaning down, resting his forehead against your own. 

Your breath hitches and you have to actively fight the way your lungs want to rattle with affection, his gestures as soft as water. 

“We have to be careful. You have to be careful. That means trusting me. And trusting that I’ll get you out of this.” 

You nod, probably faster than you should have, but you’d be anything for him. Whatever 

dies for him or whatever lives for him, too - the earth, the sea, turbulent or unmoving or quiet. Whatever and anything just as long as he needed it, needed you. 

“I want us both out of this, Gustavo.” 

“Niñita…” 

“No. I won’t accept that.” 

“Listen to me. If things go to shit, you’re going to go with Pablo’s mother and Tata. You’re going to find someplace to go, back to the United States if that’s what you want, and you’re not going to worry about me. Do you understand?” 

“But-“

“Don’t.” He cuts you off. “Do you understand?” 

You take a small step back from him, nod again. 

You understand better than you’d like. 

Gustavo takes a step forward, and you’d really like to focus on the way he’s coming to you this time, but you can’t think of anything else other than the fact that he’s got a plan laid out for if he dies, like he’s expecting it. 

“We’re safe here, ángel. Gaviria will support extradition. Or he will negotiate. He’s too intelligent and too weak not too. Nothing has changed. We won’t spend our lives in hiding.” He murmurs, so close that his body heat makes your arms prickle with goosebumps. “Try to be happy here.” 

You roll your lips between your teeth, feeling the familiar sting of salt and frustration and maybe a little bit of relief, too, building above the roof of your mouth. 

“I will.” You agree, forcing a smile. 

If he sees right through it - and he must because he looks at you for a long time before speaking again - he doesn’t say anything about it. 

“Good.” He brings his hand to the base of your skull, kisses the top of your forehead. “Come inside soon, baby. It’s cold.” 

“Yeah, okay.” You answer, watching him walk off. 

“I will.”


	6. as you were, so too was i

How do you know when it’s over?

“Hi, I….I need to speak with someone, one of your agents, I think? I don’t know if this was the right number to call-” 

You keep your head down, so close to the payphone it’s as if you’re trying to tuck yourself away in it. 

Is it something final you feel? Like a period at the end of a sentence?

“Ma’am, this is a non emergency line. If you or someone else is in need of assistance or medical attention, please hang up and dial ‘123.’ If you need the tourist police, please hang up and dial-” 

Or does it taper off? Semicolons. Ellipses. A hitch in someone’s breath. 

“No, I-I really need to speak with someone. I don’t know who to talk or how to get ahold of them even if I did and I-” 

“Ma’am-”

Does it really end at all? 

“‘-this was the only number I knew to call-”

“Again, this is a non emergency line. Please hang up and dial ‘ _one, two, three_ ’. Do you understand? ¿ _Entiendes_?” 

Taking the payphone away from your face, you stare down at it in your hand as the operator continues to instruct you. Notice for the first time the shiny, slightly worn buttons, the warmth of the black plastic in your palm, her voice barely anything at all against the sounds of moving traffic. Downtown Bogotá. The sun shining among skyscrapers. You can’t make out what she’s saying anymore, just her tone - slightly more automated, exasperated, a little annoyed. She’s the one who doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know what you’ve been through. 

Slowly, deliberately, you hang up. 

No, you think. 

This will never end. 

-

Some days pass like muddy water through thick reeds. 

Those are the days when the sun feels too hot, too close, too bright. Everything as slow and sticky as tree sap. 

Days that drag, caught in the rhythm of singing cicadas. August heat sweetened by quiet, cool nights. Filled with little and nameless acts of love. A kiss on your cheek. The pressure of a hand at the back of your neck, your hip, your knee. The indentation of thumbprints. The drag of a chapped bottom lip. 

Others roar like an angry river over jagged rocks. 

Days you feel so open to him that it hurts to even be looked at, like the vulnerable skin of a scraped knee. 

Days that keep him from you, the good parts, instead replaced by the parts of him that reveal themselves at meetings, sitting across tables, eating and poking his fork in the direction of someone else - someone equally as dangerous - as he tries to explain to them in the simplest terms he can that whatever decision they’re planning on making, it will be a foolish one. The parts that make you wonder if he’ll eventually find the one place on you he hasn’t sunk his teeth into yet and decide to take a bite when he returns, stabbing his fork. And so tender it is, so careful, that you almost might not care - almost - because his teeth are too sharp and your skin is too soft. 

Days that the discrepancy between what you show him and what you keep to yourself starts to grow steadily more intense. Your hardened heart like softened wax, hot and dripping. You’ve gotten used to the house, might even enjoy staying here. It’s beautiful, peaceful, but most of all, it’s safe. Pablo’s men leave you alone for the most part, except for Poison, whose company you enjoy the most out of everyone save for Gustavo and the kids. He’s not young enough to still have the boldness some of them do, the crass, and isn’t young enough to be shy about approaching you, either. Which is good because you don’t need to worry about what he might say, what he might do or relay or force. He isn’t old enough to make you feel deferential, either, to intimidate you into polite conversation like Pablo. Not like the rest of them. He’s easy to talk to because he makes you feel like a person. Like you’re being seen and heard. 

Like you matter. 

Days with him are the good kind. 

Your bare feet walk the smooth path away from the main house towards the soccer field. You’ve been here for nearly a month now, the night is sweet and warm with August. Things have progressed much faster than you thought they would, have only gotten worse, but maybe it was just your own willful ignorance that made it difficult to foresee that Gacha would be killed in a shootout along with his son. That Pablo would blow up a plane. That he’d kidnap a reporter, hold her hostage, and accidentally get her killed for leverage because his original plans - more bombings, more assassinations, to scorch and salt the earth belonging to every reporter, every cop, every politician - were too on the nose, too risky. The civil war that would cause would be too much trouble. 

Horrors you couldn’t come up with if you tried. 

Horrors you knew Gustavo had. 

Because he wasn’t ready to die yet. And neither was Pablo. Bombs made the people want peace, right? They would influence the important people, make them pay attention, force them to pay attention, except politicians don’t give a shit about the public, not really. Not in any way that matters. That’s the thing with elected officials. Once they win, their promises of representation, or of justice and prosperity, don’t mean shit. That’s the thing about trust, too. You’ve just got to _trust_ that they’ve got your interests in mind.

Just like you’ve got to trust that he loves you enough to have you in his. 

Gustavo knew there was a smarter move to be made. They needed to narrow their focus. Pinpoint it. Broad strokes are only good maneuvers for so long. There comes a point in time when things - _situations_ \- become personal. 

Why not go after one of their own? 

Calling a truce in its terrorist campaign, yielding to the government’s desire for peace. 

Hitting them, instead, where it really hurts. 

-

He had gone missing for a while, with Pablo somewhere in the mountains. Poison assured you it was okay, that they’d be okay, but you could tell from the look on his face he didn’t believe what he was saying, that he wasn’t sure. Not when just weeks earlier he had been face to face with not just one DEA agent, but two. Chased over rooftops ready to fall in, _actually falling through one_ , running into traffic. Bullets whizzing. Cornered, briefly. Quica rescued by a fucking eight year old with a handgun. 

All of this overheard hiding behind the side of an open doorway. Another raid. Pablo and Gustavo’s voices a low murmur in soft lamplight. From what you could tell Pablo was sitting on the couch, his elbows on his knees, watching Gustavo pace in front of him. The worrier. You wanted to come up to him and smooth away the wrinkle between his eyebrows, to kiss the frown from off his face, but knew that you couldn’t, that you shouldn’t, because this was a conversation you weren’t supposed to be hearing. 

“There’s no respect. I couldn’t even grab the cigarettes.” He had said, stress making his voice aggressive and high pitched. 

Pablo grumbled. 

“I’m gonna shoot every fucking hostage in the head.” Was the answer that followed. 

You stopped listening after that. 

-

Poison’s footsteps are light in their approach as he comes up from behind you. 

“What are you thinking about, llavería?” 

You look away from the dewy field of grass - not directly at him, but somewhere close to his feet, dress shoes neatly polished and expensive looking - conscious of the way your near dry tears stretch against your cheeks when you smile in habit, like an animal stabbed in the stomach. You had gone outside thinking you’d be alone, unwilling or perhaps afraid to go to bed. Not of him. Not of what you might say, or more dangerously, what might come out of his mouth but of the possibility that upon waking up tomorrow he’d be gone again like this morning. 

“Gustavo.” 

“ _Jesus_.” 

You’re used to the teasing, but tonight your indignation forces you to defend yourself, your words coming out self-conscious and soft instead of with the ire you had intended. “Someone needs to.” 

Poison breathes something that sounds like a laugh and shakes his head in response as he pinches a cigarette between his thumb and pointer finger, taking it out of the carton sitting in the pocket of his dress shirt. “Of course, you’re a silly romantic.” 

“Don’t make fun of me.” 

The flame of his lighter casts his face into a series of red and orange shadows and you can see that he’s grown more serious, taking a drag and exhaling grey, wispy smoke before speaking again. “I’m not.” 

“It feels like you are.” 

“You know that I wouldn’t.” He refutes in a gentler tone. 

Your counterpart then shrugs, the ember glow of his cigarette like a squashed lightning bug at his side. “I was in love once.” 

Poison snorts. “You look at me like that, but I’m not kidding.” He steps closer, standing beside you now. He must want you to listen. “Her name was Wendy. I used to take her dancing on the weekends.” 

“But…eventually she wanted more than dancing. She wanted to settle down, get married, to have kids. All that domestic shit that women want, but she knew about Pablo, didn’t like what I was doing, complained that it was dangerous. She knew that for as long as I worked for him, the life she wanted wouldn’t be possible. The problem was that because I was _young_ and _stupid_ -” He emphasizes these words in a way that as you staring down at the ground and gritting your teeth. “And _in love_ , I almost let her convince me to abandon this job. 

“We’d scream and yell at each other, then I realized that pussy isn’t worth losing all this for, and you know what I said to her? I said to her one day… _Pablo is going to ask me to kill you._ ” 

You think that you see his expression pull into a snarl, but you can’t bring yourself to look at him fully. 

“She had a few problems with that, clearly. Didn’t believe that I would and went on and on and on, bitching about how I couldn’t because I love her. Idiota _._ Until finally she demands to know what I would do.” 

You brace yourself, caught trance like in the subtle sinisterness of his story, trying to find the lesson in his warning without giving yourself away despite the electricity in your teeth. Talking with him has never been like this before. You don’t know what’s happening. 

“So I said, _if he asks me…of course_.” 

When he smiles, tossing his bud onto the ground and snuffing it out with the toe of his boot, it’s like staring into the mouth of an alligator. This is the first time, you realize with sickening sadness, that you’ve ever been afraid of him. 

“Careful with what you say, chiquita. Love is nice, but it comes at a cost. The only person you should really care about is yourself.” 

\- 

Staring into a patch of bleached grass, you don’t hear him coming. 

“It’s going to rain today.”

You look away from the crossword in your lap, blinking your vision back into focus before glancing up at the sky, bright and cloudless, sitting only a few steps away from the spot you were in a few days ago, just barely recovered from your previous encounter with him. “How do you know?” 

Poison stands next to your chair, his hands in his pockets, the cross around his neck catching sunlight the way leaves do, shimmering. Another icon. Another irony. “Because my knee hurts.” 

What he had said the last time you spoke hasn’t left your mind. You’ve been reluctant to ask for more clarity, couldn’t get yourself to bring it up with Gustavo. Your conversations with him have been kinder, recently, more relaxed and less about extradition, less about moving and what was said on beaches and in showers and while riding in private jets.

You talk about life. About what he’d do if you asked for a pet. Plans for the day, discussions about the museum you had been wanting to visit. How to decorate your house. The places you missed and the ones that you didn’t. 

Your family. What you were studying in college before you met him. What your mother would think of you now, shackled up with a drug dealer, how awkward that would make holidays. 

But not this. Not your honest fear that maybe - probably, God you really fucking hope not - Poison had been replacing your name with Wendy’s, and Gustavo’s with his. 

“Your knee?” 

“Not all of us are as young as you.” He teases, his grin slanting, sunglasses reflecting, hiding whatever might reveal itself to you otherwise.

“You’re ridiculous. That can’t be true.” 

“If not today, then tomorrow. You’ll see. I’m right.” 

-

“What was that about?” Your voice is unobtrusive, gentle from where you stand in the doorway, flanked by cerulean window frames that look out into a yard full of mist and singing grasshoppers. Held in your fingers is a dish towel, your hands still wet from clearing the table. Another one of those soft-pedaled nights that sneak up on you, forgiving in their almost normalcy. 

That reporter you see sometimes had just left with Pablo’s lawyer. Good news, you think, because you had watched Pablo walk out with her with a smile on his face, but whatever else you might have seen was lost because you had looked away quickly when he pulled her towards him, didn’t notice, then, their conversation or the way it shifted nor the way she left. Had gone back to cleaning up the kitchen, carrying glasses of half-finished whiskey to the sink while Gustavo kissed your arm, then your neck, your cheek, temple, murmuring a quiet thank you before disappearing into the hallway leading outside. 

He looks over his shoulder at you now, smiles in a way that has you smiling back. You like that shirt on him the most, the one with the pink and blue stripes. It compliments his skin tone well, fits along his shoulders nicely. His hair is getting longer, too, long enough to touch the collar now and you wish he were close enough for you to run your fingers through it. Take off that silly hat, be near him. You like the most, however, that you’re still able to see him in it. That he hasn’t gone away somewhere again. 

“It looks like he got away with it.” 

“With the jail?” You step down from the porch and walk towards where he stands in the grass, just inside the perimeters of the quasi, concrete fence that surrounds the property. 

“Yes, with the jail. As long as he turns himself in for drug trafficking, in exchange they’ll let him build a prison without guards. Crazy motherfucker.” He chuckles, shaking his head. “You know what that means, niñita?” 

“No? What does it mean?” You’re next to him now, looking up into his profile, his warmth enough to assuage any fear that comes with the knowledge that this could all just be smoke and mirrors. The Colombian government has been going after you all for years. You can’t believe they’d roll over just like that. You don’t suspect that Pablo would be eager to do the same, either. 

Gustavo tosses the cigarette he had been smoking into the yard, then turns to cup your face in his hands. In his expression is something you haven’t seen before. A kind of relief. “No more running.” 

No more running. The words should be setting your skin on fire, but all you can focus on is the chance that maybe what has saved you all along has been the survival instinct awakened in you and sharpened by new sceneries and constant threats. What happens once you allow yourself to relax? 

“What about you? Do they only expect Pablo to turn himself in or all of you? Gustavo, I don’t want to spend my days being shuttled back and forth hidden in a truck or surrounded by strangers in a prison.” 

“You’ll live with Tata and the kids in a house down the hill. You can visit whenever you like.” 

“ _Gustavo_.” 

He drops his hands, exhales, scrubs his mouth with his hand to curb his frustration. There’s so much you don’t understand and little time to explain it. This must happen. Whether or not you like it is irrelevant. 

“Pajarito, please. This is the only way. We’ve already spoken about the operational plans and everything’s clear. We finally have peace.” 

You hate that word. Don’t even know what it means anymore. 

“It must be decided, then. You two go to prison while I’m stuck out here, alone, left out of the decisions, outside the family. When were you going to talk to me about this-” 

“Yes, it’s decided.” Gustavo interrupts, too tired to sound anything more than exhausted. “But clearly it was my mistake thinking you were smart enough to know this was coming-” 

“I just want to be with you and you never see that. I have given up everything. Everything. To be with you, Gustavo. My education. My family. My friends. My freedom. Because I love you. Because there’s no one else, and you make these decisions like I don’t exist!” 

He scoffs. Looks down at his feet, smiling. His laughter is like battery acid. “Baby, if it were that easy we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” 

You look deliberately away from him, hurt, picking at your thumbnail until it stings. There’s a long moment of nothing in which you both stand there listening to the sprinkler system turn on, daring each other to be the first one to speak. You had been doing so well. Tragic it’s about to fall to ruin so quick.

Gustavo sighs. He lifts his hat and brushes his hair back. 

“There isn’t a time when I’m not thinking about you.” This makes you look at him and you catch him looking back, but he averts his gaze, had only wanted to make sure you were listening.

“Every morning I wake up I think of you. At night when we go to bed. You wonder why you’re left out. Why I don’t tell you things. Do you know why I don’t involve you? Think about it, niñita. It’s to keep you safe. Innocent. Away from this shit.”

So that if anything happened, if you managed to get pinned down, held up in some interrogation room, you wouldn’t be able to incriminate yourself, at least not in a way compelling enough for you to be arrested and charged. A safety precaution implemented since your first meeting initially only put in place to protect himself, but now…now the meaning of it encroaches on you like a slow growing vine. 

“I’m not trying to hurt you, but the sooner you realize I act in both our interests, the better it will be for you. The easier this will become to deal with.” 

It’s all you can do to nod. Gustavo makes a gesture with his hand. “Come here.” 

You go to stand in front of him, but you’re unable to look up at his face, bothered so much by the idea of not seeing him, of not being able to stand in front of him like this without putting you both at risk, that it physically aches and you can’t bring yourself to do it at all. To look into his face now would to be reminded that within a few weeks it and the rest of him will be nearly unattainable. 

“Look at me. Look at me, baby.” He takes a hold of your chin, uses it to tilt your head up until you finally do as he says, meeting his gaze like shattering glass. “It was terrible…every day in a different house…worrying. I know it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for any of us. But if this is really good and we can keep making money, after this we won’t have anything to worry about.” 

You swallow and it pops in your ears. You nod again. 

Gustavo bends slightly, leans down and wraps his arms around your waist, tugging you closer to him so that he can pepper your cheeks in kisses. “We can visit your family…buy that damn puppy you’ve been asking about…get a house of our own…anything you want.” 

Home. If someone asked you what that word meant now you’d tell him it’s the obsidian class ring on his pinky finger. It’s the medallion hanging from his neck. It’s the soft spaces between his words when he looks at you behind his sunglasses. It’s the roaring of your blood whenever he’s near. 

It’s him. Always. 

“Anything I want?” You wrap your arms around his shoulders, grinning at the tickle of his mustache. He hums into your neck. 

“Two puppies?” 

You feel his huff of laughter, a puff of warm air against your throat. “Don’t push it, niñita.”

“Hm. Thought I’d try.” 

-

Pablo’s mother’s house is warm. 

The first place you’ve been that’s felt like an actual home in awhile, smelling always like food is being prepared. It makes you miss the smell of your grandmother’s, reminds you in a bittersweet way the distance that separates you from your own family, but with things more optimistic - a little sweeter, a little less stressed - his family is in good spirits, have had almost a change of heart. 

“So…when are you finally going to marry my nephew? No, no. Use this. Careful, you’re going to burn yourself that way, mijita. Ay, it’s like you’ve never been in a kitchen before.” Hermilda’s manicured hand passes a wooden sauce spoon in your direction with maternal exasperation, her other turning the stove top burner down. Tata, separating you from her mother in law, wipes her hands on her apron before she gives it to you and has to hide her smile. You know immediately that she’s wondering about that too, and that Hermilda is still expecting an answer to her question. 

“I, uh, we haven’t really talked about it. I don’t know.” You fight to keep yourself from grinning too hard and smile shyly instead. It’s something you’ve thought about. You’d like to be his wife, but actually getting there with him has always seemed out of bounds. Unrealistic. For Pablo and Tata it made sense. They have children. They got married during the cartel’s golden years before things started to take a turn. Now, with you and Gustavo and with everything else going on, it just seems like something silly. 

“Haven’t talked about it?” The startled offense in her voice makes you want to laugh. “Tata, you need to tell my son he needs to talk some sense into his cousin. Haven’t talked about marriage…trying to kill me.” She mutters the last bit to herself as she carries a bowl of steaming rice to the table, shaking her head. 

You and Tata share a look. Some silence passes. 

“Do you?” 

“Do I what?” You don’t look away from the gravy you’ve begun to gently stir. 

“Do you want to get married?” 

You consider the merits of answering. If you tell her how you honestly feel, that might push and you and Gustavo in the right direction, but so far anything you’ve managed to articulate seems to jinx itself once it comes out of your mouth - you nearly can’t bring yourself to be that hopeful. 

“Yes, but I don’t - I mean, I’m just not sure that he does. With everything that’s being going on, it doesn’t seem like the most important thing to talk about, you know? Maybe with things less tense than they’ve been we can finally get around to considering it. I doubt it, though. He’ll be in that jail with Pablo, they’ll be trying to run things from the inside…I’m okay with the way things are with us right now.” 

“Don’t you want more?” She asks in a low voice and you look at her to find that she’s looking back. 

“Of course I do…I want so much for him, for the both of us, but you know how it is, Tata.” 

She turns away and nods. 

-

“I’m going, niñita.” Gustavo comes up from behind you, places a palm to the back of your neck and kisses the crown of your head, all the while still moving. You’re barely facing him when he’s halfway past the table, stuck trying to catch up with his retreating back. 

He grabs his keys, his hat, and makes it almost all the way into the other room before you call out to him again. 

“Wait. We’re just about to have dinner.” You gesture back towards the stove, to the table. 

“I’ll eat when I get back.” 

You frown, worry your bottom lip with your pointer finger and thumb, restless in a way that seems like your anxieties have always been permanent - knowing nothing else, knowing no peace. “Can’t you stay? Is it really that important that you go?” 

“Yes, nena. Pablo-” 

“ _Pablo._ ” The irritation and disgust in your voice is palpable. You step closer to him, careful not to raise your voice. “ _It’s always Pablo_. Always making you clean up his messes, putting you at risk. Why can’t it wait? Just for a day? We’ve been cooking for hours.” 

Gustavo sighs, cups the back of your head and kisses your forehead, then places his hand on your shoulder before dropping it and catching your hand. “It’s for the jail, mi amor. I’ll be right back.” 

“You really can’t stay? There’s something I want to talk to you about…” 

“Niñita. It will have to wait.” 

It’s useless arguing with him, so you let it drop, resigning yourself to having to be patient the way fire holds something it’s burned - even though he sometimes demands too much. 

“Okay,” you concede, bringing your hands to his chest, smoothing down his shirt with a small and helpless smile. “I’ll save you a plate. Just…just be careful, yeah?” 

“I’m not stupid, nena-” 

“Gustavo.” 

He chuckles, leans down and kisses you slow and sweet. “I’ll be careful.” 

“Bye…” You whisper once he pulls away. 

“Bye.” He whispers back. 

-

“Now let’s eat and enjoy this marvelous food!” Pablo announces, tucking his shirt into his pants, a warm and relieved smile on his face. Sitting across the table from him, next to Tata, you see the way he looks at her - lovingly, adoringly. Fortunately for everyone, he’s been in a good mood since news of the government’s agreement had been given. In better spirits, hopeful, even, as sadistic as it sounds. And you smile automatically, relieved too but for a different reason. 

His mother passes him the beats as you help Manuela with her plate. 

“Tata! Boss!” 

The sound of hurried footsteps and shouting interrupts the flow of dinner. Pablo looks up from his food as La Quica runs into the room, out of breath and in a blue shirt, his gun tucked against his stomach in the waistband of his pants, holding his white motorcycle helmet. 

Hermilda immediately invites him to sit down, but whatever niceties she had left to say is railroaded by his continued and distraught speech. 

“Boss, I don’t know how to say this.” 

You set your fork down. Everyone turns to look at him. 

Pablo stands up, rounds the table so that the only thing separating them are his mother and the chair she is sitting in, his hands going to his waist. “Tell me like a man.” 

Quica hesitates, shifting his weight, wobbling slightly, the color leaving his face when he gets enough courage - instantaneous, immediately gone - to glance in your direction. 

His grip on the helmet slips just enough to make him have to catch it. 

“Gustavo is dead.” 

The world opens up into a vacuum. 

Tata rises to her feet, simply asks what, followed by Hermilda who drops her fork and you register the noise of it clattering against her plate beneath the static behind your ears. 

“They found his body on the outskirts of Sabaneta, badly beaten.” 

“How’s that?” Pablo’s mother this time. Hysteria in her voice. 

There’s a very brief moment of quiet. “They also shot him, boss.” 

She goes to him, still in her apron. You notice she hasn’t brushed some of the flour off it before sitting down. A strange thing to focus on. You remain in your seat, can feel the children looking at you. 

“No! No! How dare you come to my house saying that! How dare you! Leave! Get out of my house!” Hermilda raises her palm, smacks it across his cheek. 

Quica takes the abuse, lets her slap him without fighting back, only taking a small step backwards as Pablo steps forward, gathering his mother into his arms. “You…you are leaving right now! Get out of my house! Go on!” 

She doesn’t stop fighting, points her finger at him and pushes against her son, becoming more desperate, refusing to believe that any of what he’s said could be true. “No! Gustavo, no. Pablo…” She looks at him one last time. “Go on! Get out of here!” 

Pablo brings her into his chest, whispers to her quietly. She begins to sob into his shoulder. 

He looks over her head. “Are you sure about this?” 

He asks so quietly you almost don’t catch it. Quica answers softly. “Yes, boss.” 

“I want you to take him to the funeral home…and guard his body the entire time until it’s buried.” 

La Quica nods, turns to you head on for the first time since entering the room. “I’m sorry.” 

There’s so much you suddenly want to ask him and simultaneously nothing at all, numb and furious, staring at him through hazy vision, but you’re cut off by Pablo before you can so much push back in your seat. 

“Go on.” 

Quica nods again, bows slightly, then leaves the room. 

\- 

There’s a stretch of beach within walking distance of the house. 

You go to it after Hermilda calms down. 

No one really says anything. They let you leave. There are other things that need to be taken care of. They know they should leave you alone with your grief. 

The transition from grass to sand falters your steps, but you keep going, staring at the orange horizon. 

It’s only when you get within a wave’s reach that everything seems to hit all at once. The shock wearing off, falling away like a severely damaged piece of armor. 

He was just here. 

He was just here and there’s a pressure building in your head, the one that arrives when you’re about to cry, resting above the roof of your mouth and behind your eyes; suspending your body in a sadness so profound and powerful it makes your throat constrict, strangles any noise you want to make, makes it hard to breath, to think. 

And it strains the weight of the life you’re living until it finally breaks. 

Your anger and your hurt recedes like a disrupted ocean - massing into this tidal wave of despair and fear and hatred until it’s knocked over and crushed everything decipherable within yourself - roaring with its own fury. Drowning, suffocating, killing any conceptualization of the world with Gustavo still in it. Leaving behind only a mess of debris and murky waters filled to the brim with your confusing love for him. 

You fold inward on yourself. Clench your arm into your chest as if it’ll clog the black hole in the center of your sternum and can feel yourself shutting down, like you want to tell everyone but especially him that they can’t use your heart anymore, that it’s too delicate. That if one more person takes advantage of it it’ll break even more and be nothing. 

But he isn’t here and you can’t tell him - can’t tell him anything anymore because he’s dead. 

Aware, suddenly, that he spent the last moments of his life in an empty parking garage. 

“Fuck-fuck-he was just here, he was just here. No, no no no no.” 

The absurdity of it makes you want to scream and laugh and close your eyes at all once. 

You can’t do much of anything, though, not when it feels like your lungs are atrophying with each hiccup, like the might get caught on the curves of your ribs with the force in which they heave in your chest - feeling endless, like you’ll never be able to stop or catch your breath, like the entire fucking world is sinking in on itself and you’re at its very center; piled beneath the weight of everything else, folding eternally inwards. 

Until it stops. Until a sense of calm settles around your shoulders, a giant and warm quilt - an emergency button pressed somewhere in your body to get you under control before you disappear entirely. 

His loss no longer inundated, but hitting in small waves, the kind that lap at your ankles. 

That should be it, then. You should go home, wherever that is. 

It hadn’t rained. 

-

The security guard is a man in his late fifties, balding and red faced, dressed in a black neatly pressed suit that is starting to wrinkle as he moves to block you from the entrance, his gun itching at his hip tucked under the flap of his jacket. “Unless you have the clearances, ma’am, I cannot let you in past this point.”

A second battle. A second plea. No one wants to listen. “No, please. I need to talk to someone. I have information.” 

You’re beginning to attract attention. Foreign Service Officers go through the white metal detectors without any issue, collecting their watches and briefcases, slipping their badges back into their pockets as they look over their shoulder at the woman half-crazy with grief begging to be heard. An interesting start to their day, a funny conversation to tell their coworkers once they reach their desks. 

“So does everybody else, so either you leave on your own or I’ll have to remove you. The choice is yours.” 

“Why isn’t anyone listening? Please-” 

Javier is climbing up the steps, watching those leaving chuckling among themselves as they descend, when he first hears the voice. 

Your voice. High pitched and brimming with desperation. Trying to stay calm, or at least something close to it, not raising your voice, but very close to being frustrated enough to do it. A voice he’s listened to through an earpiece in the very building he’s about to enter plead with the same heartache, the same fearful anxiety, to the man who had just been found murdered and dumped the day before. 

Moving with more urgency, he pushes past his coworkers and intercepts your conversation - placing a hand in between your shoulder blades. 

You startle, blink up at him confused. 

“She’s with me.” 

“Peña, look-” 

“I know her. She’s with me.” With the hand that is touching you, he guides you in front of him and starts walking, quietly asking if you have on any jewelry that might set off the machine. He exhales and scrubs his mouth when you reach for the clasp at your neck and carefully set an icon of the Virgin Mary into the plastic, light grey bin. 

You follow him silently through hallways and try very hard to focus on the mundane things around you instead of what’s coming - the clinking of typewriter keys, the smell of coffee and cigarette smoke, the distant ringing of telephones and the muted noise of people talking. So far, this agent has said very little to you, but you can tell that he’s probably got a lot to say, even more to ask. You’ve got your rights, though, certain protections. Bureaucratic red tape and lines that he cannot cross, so even though you’d be more than willing to give him whatever he wanted, you both know he won’t let you. Not without properly going through everything first. 

He stops at a room with a charcoal door and opens it, then waits for you to step inside before following. Javier then pulls out a chair - one of only two that are tucked into a plastic white folding table - and gestures for you to sit. 

“What’s your name?” 

You look around. Bravery is a rare thing. Now that you’ve had a taste, you’re not sure you want it anymore. Tempted instead to shut yourself up in agony, board yourself up as if boarding the windows of a house, foolish enough to think you’ll be able to weather it and that eventually it would pass, fortunate enough now that all the floodwaters do is lap over your feet. 

But you give it to him anyway sure that he already knows it. 

Javier clears his throat. “I heard what you were saying to the guard, but I still need to ask why you’re here.” He doesn’t sit down, lingers instead by the door like he’s only a few sentences away from walking through it. You know vaguely about how this works. You won’t be able to tell him a thing until he’s got his legal ducks all lined up in a row if he wants to be able to use your information. 

Except you’re impatient now, afraid of losing your will and burying what you’ve got to say in your grief. 

“I don’t want a lawyer. I’m coming forward as a witness or whatever the term is…I don’t know the actual words for what I’m doing, but I think I have information that’ll help you catch Pablo. I just…I don’t know where to start.” 

Javier nods slowly, steps away from the door just as another agent walks inside. A tall blond man holding two cups of coffee that he passes to Javier, who then places the Dixie cup onto the table in front of you. 

The shoulders of his light grey suit are dotted with raindrops. 

“How about at the beginning?” 


End file.
